Sonos is no stranger to the occasional sale. The iconic audio company routinely runs sales around Black Friday, Amazon Prime Day, and the Super Bowl, though it’s rare to see substantial discounts on its portable speakers outside of tentpole shopping events. Fortunately, if you have no interest in...
Consumer Tech
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about online age verification and your privacy, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Virtual private...
AI was everywhere at the GDC Festival of Gaming this year. Vendors at the event pitched generative AI tools for things like making AI-driven NPCs and even entire games from a chat box. On the show floor, I spent 10 minutes playing a demo of a pixel-art fantasy world generated by Tencent's AI tool...
Halide running on an iPhone. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Lux Optics co-founder Sebastiaan de With made headlines when he joined Apple in late January. The company was behind Halide, one of the most popular photography apps for the iPhone, which gained a cult following for its robust pr...
There could be one more step required before creating an account and posting on Reddit in the future. According to Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, the social media platform is exploring different ways to verify a user is human and not a bot. When asked by the TBPN podcast how to confirm that it's a ...
Need something new for your reading list? Here are two titles we think are worth checking out. This week, we've got Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary and The Thing on the Doorstep, an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation for Image Comics. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.c...
A legal feud between the co-founders of Lux Optics, the developer behind the Halide camera app, revealed that Apple was close to acquiring the company. As first reported by The Information, Apple held acquisition talks for Lux Optics, which also developed the Kino, Spectre and Orion apps, in the ...
The best-selling game of all time is moving from the virtual to the physical. Minecraft World, a permanent Greater London theme park based on the game, is scheduled to open in 2027. The announcement came during Minecraft Live 2026. It will be a new section in Chessington World of Adventures, a th...
Less than a week ago, Apple announced the forthcoming AirPods Max 2, a pair of over-ear headphones that leverage the company’s H2 chip for AI-powered live translation, conversation awareness, and a host of newer features. However, if you’re okay with a pair of earbuds, the AirPods Pro 3 offer acc...
While other tech companies have been laying off employees year after year, OpenAI is doing the opposite. According to a report from the Financial Times, the AI giant is looking to expand its workforce to 8,000 employees by the end of 2026, nearly doubling staff from its current headcount of 4,500...
It doesn’t sound like Crimson Desert, the recently released prequel to Black Desert Online, will support Intel Arc GPUs anytime soon, if at all. On the game’s FAQ page, its developer Pearl Abyss advised players expecting Arc support to apply for a refund. “If you purchased the game expecting Inte...
Remember when Japan sent a spacecraft to an asteroid 180 million miles away to scoop some dirt off the surface? Six years on from its arrival to Earth, that sample has yielded some insights about what may have seeded life on our planet. Read on to learn more about the latest findings, and other s...
REI’s latest sale is in full swing. The outdoor retailer’s exclusive shopping event runs through Monday, March 23rd, bringing with it a batch of discounts on Garmin watches, tents, portable stoves, and a slew of Verge-approved goodies. As expected, most deals are available only to REI members; ho...
Twitter is officially 20 years old. In another reality, that might make me kind of nostalgic. I've been lurking and scrolling and tweeting for 16 years; most of my adult life. There was a time when Twitter was a place where some internet strangers became my IRL friends, when I was excited to "liv...
Like many people, director Valerie Veatch was intrigued when OpenAI first released its Sora text-to-video generative AI model to the public in 2024. Though she didn't fully understand the technology, she was curious about what it could do, and she saw that other artists were building online commu...
The funny shape of eggs is the curious lifeblood of Oeuf, the new physics platformer by prolific developer Increpare Games. In a gaming landscape saturated with complex systems dropped into simple games, that grapples with metaphor within straightforward narratives, and that is desperate to bring...
Amazon’s Big Spring Sale doesn’t kick off until next week, but the retailer is already dropping a host of good deals, especially on robot vacuums. We recently saw Ecovacs’ Deebot X8 and X9 Pro Omni drop to $599 ($501 off) and $679 ($621 off), respectively; however, if you’re looking for a cheaper...
Apple already announced a lot of new devices in 2026 and we’ve been busy reviewing them all. In this installment of our bi-weekly roundup, we revisit the MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e and more, in addition to the “regular” Galaxy S26 and Dell XPS 16. There’s even more than those gadget to catch up on, ...
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 120, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, get ready for Pen Opinions, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Banksy and music apps and influ...
It just looks like, well, most other MacBook Pros. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Apple's flagship 16-inch MacBook Pro has reigned supreme in the world of creator-focused laptops since its M-series processor overhaul in 2021. Since then, we've mostly seen the same design with year...