Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 135, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, crank the AC, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about cold plunges and Colson Whitehead and the foo...
Roleplaying games are often defined by excess. Storylines that span dozens of hours, side quests so big they could be their own game, massive worlds that require complex maps to explore, and casts so big you start forgetting character names. That's part of what makes these games feel like epic ad...
A luxurious hot shower anywhere you go. Hot showers, like electricity, are a luxury that's easy to take for granted. That all changes after a few nights camping at a music festival, a week toiling at a backcountry job site, or overlanding all summer in the great unknown. An itchy scalp and the ...
On Thursday, the Instagram account for a lecture series in Newport Beach, CA posted a photo of what appeared to be a cease and desist letter from the surveillance technology company Flock Safety. Flock has received significant backlash over its technology and work with law enforcement agencies, a...
Following significant backlash, Meta is turning off the feature it announced this week that let users generate AI images based on content from public Instagram accounts just by tagging them. The feature, as originally set up, meant that content from any public Instagram account could be used in A...
The Xtra Muse and the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Last year, we told you about Xtra, the company that lets DJI sneak its popular cameras into the US, and Skyrover, a brand seemingly selling DJI drones in disguise. They're just two of the many firms DJI is suspected ...
Apple has sued OpenAI, alleging that engineers stole Apple secrets to advance the AI startup's hardware plans. In its complaint, Apple says it uncovered "a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple." In addition to OpenAI, the lawsuit also names IO P...
When Niantic dropped the first Pokémon Go trailer in 2015, it was hard to grasp how a bunch of players could work together to catch a pokémon like Mewtwo. But this week at the game's 10th anniversary event in New York City, Pokémon Go showed the world how it's done. Almost 2,000 players (many of ...
Department of Homeland Security. | Image: The Verge Advocates are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security release bodycam footage of the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who was killed by ICE officers in Houston during a traffic stop earlier this week. Bu...
SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung. | Image: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images As the AI boom boosts demand for RAM, SK Hynix - one of the world's biggest suppliers of memory chips - launched on Wall Street Friday. The South Korean chipmaker opened at $170 per share and raised $26.5 billion, sur...
Spotify is giving listeners control to fine-tune what gets surfaced for them in Release Radar - one of its most popular weekly playlists. The new options allow you to narrow the playlist to a specific genre, focus on artists that are new to you, and more. Listeners can choose from up to five opti...
Netflix has shows and movies. And video games. And live sports. And podcasts. And also, apparently, YouTube videos? For a company that used to seem like the next big thing in TV, it all feels a little frenetic, and maybe a tad desperate. For a company that sees sleep as its primary competitor, it...
Disney Plus is considering making some of its content free to watch, according to a report from Business Insider. A source tells the outlet that Adam Smith, Disney's chief product and technology officer, mentioned a free streaming tier during the company's town hall on Thursday. It's not clear wh...
Anker’s Prime Wireless Charging Station can deliver up to 25W of power to compatible iPhones. If you’re looking to declutter your nightstand and quickly charge up to three of your most-used gadgets, Anker’s Prime Wireless Charging Station is an easy way to do both. The station has spots for you...
I used the Trump phone for a week so that you don’t have to. The Trump phone was never a serious phone. Not when it was announced last June, in dodgy renders and with an incoherent spec sheet. Nor when Trump Mobile admitted - just two weeks later - that it wouldn't be made in the US. Not even w...
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. Bryan Johnson, best known as the man who wants to live forever, has an incurable ...
Hello my friends! My protocol pals! My computational compadres! I'm David, a technology reporter and cohost of the Waveform Podcast. I'll be hosting a subscriber-only "AMA" today at 11AM PT / 2PM ET. For the next six weeks, I'm filling in for senior reviewer Allison Johnson, who you are all likel...
Though Instagram head Adam Mosseri doesn't want to filter out AI content on the platform, he argues that you "shouldn't have it in your feed" if you don't like it. "I don't think we should filter out AI content," Mosseri said during an interview on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast. "I think we should le...
A solar and home energy storage company is expanding into AI data centers, but not by building one - instead, it's offering to pay its customers to put its compute units in their homes. Sunrun is launching a pilot program for a new "distributed AI compute" program that will "place numerous comput...
The modular blue-tinted glasses shell included with the A01 Plus won’t turn your content blue. | Photo: Cameron Faulkner / The Verge I love it when a company challenges itself to make a cheaper version of a beloved product. Xreal's $299 A01 Plus is a stripped-down version of its $449 1S that's ...