Grok, how do you make chips? | Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Elon Musk announced plans to build a Terafab plant in Austin, Texas, that will be jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX. The goal is to eventually build chips at scale for robotics, artificial intelligence, and space-based data centers f...
The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. It wasn't supposed to be anything in music, really. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines. The engineer, Homer Dudley, built som...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
An AI assistant that can actually get things done. I've been testing out Gemini's new task automation on the Pixel 10 Pro and the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which for the first time lets Gemini take the wheel and use apps for you. It's limited to a small subset right now - a handful of food delivery and...
This year is shaping up to be a big one for self-driving trucks. In addition to Aurora's plan to deploy hundreds of autonomous big rigs and Waabi expanding into robotaxis, you've also got Kodiak AI aiming to launch its own fully driverless long-haul freight operation by the end of 2026. While rob...
All hail true remote access. My Starlink Mini has radically changed the way I live. It's the biggest reason I can work remotely from my converted van, providing fast and reliable internet in places that traditional 4G and 5G data signals don't reach. Peakdo's latest LinkPower battery makes the ...