Rivian delays first electric pickup deliveries to September

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

Rivian has delayed the first deliveries of its long-awaited electric pickup truck again, this time until September. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe broke the news to buyers in an email sent Friday morning.

The Amazon and Ford-backed EV startup originally planned to start delivering its electric pickup, the R1T, and its SUV, the R1S, in 2020. But it scuttled those plans at the beginning of the pandemic and said at the time that it would start deliveries in 2021 instead. Rivian eventually settled on starting deliveries of the R1T in June of this year, only to push that back to July, and now to September.

“We know you can’t wait to get behind the wheel of your vehicle,” Scaringe wrote in the email. “Earlier this summer, we announced that...

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Vergecast: the state of MagSafe, Valve’s Steam Deck, and billionaires in space

Image: Apple

Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.

This week on the show, Nilay and Dieter bring back_Verge_ managing editor Alex Cranz to discuss the announcement of Valve’s gaming handheld the Steam Deck, Netflix’s dive into gaming, Apple iPhone 13 rumors, the state of MagSafe, and, of course, the growing number of billionaires in space.

You can listen to the full discussion here or in your preferred podcast player.

Further reading:

• The COVID-19 vaccines weren’t hacked — this task force is one reason why
• Foxconn and TSMC strike deal to buy 10 million COVID vaccines for Taiwan
• V...

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Google executive steps down after offensive manifesto about antisemitic past

Photo by studioEAST / Getty Images

Google parted ways with a cloud services executive after he published a LinkedIn manifesto about Israeli-Palestinian relations and his vehemently antisemitic past. CNBC reports that Google faced internal criticism over Amr Awadallah, VP of developer relations at Google Cloud. While Awadallah said he published the piece to promote tolerance and understanding, employees objected to how Awadallah described Jews and expressed concerns about his past beliefs.

Awadallah began the June 13th post — titled “We are one!” — with a declaration that “‘I hated the Jewish people, all the Jewish people’! and emphasis here is on the past tense.” The 10,000-word manifesto discussed his upbringing in Egypt, saying he’d been “very cautious” working with...

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Counterfeit wireless earbuds are being seized in record numbers at US border

Image: US Customs and Border Protection

The number of counterfeit wireless earbuds seized by US border customs in 2021 has already surpassed last year’s total, according to a report from The Information. It’s a sign of how eager the makers of these knockoffs are to keep riding the sustained popularity of earbuds like Apple’s AirPods and those from Samsung, Jabra, Bose, Sony, and other companies.

According to the report, “roughly 360,000 counterfeit wireless headphones” — valued at $62.2 million — were nabbed in the first nine months of fiscal 2021. That’s well above the 295,000 pairs that were confiscated during the whole of fiscal 2020. Just yesterday, US Customs and Border Protection announced a major confiscation in Cincinnati.

Around 80 percent of fakes entering the US...

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Emergency department visits spiked during June heat wave in US Northwest

Residents at a cooling center during a heatwave in Portland, Oregon, U.S., on Monday, June 28, 2021. | Maranie Staab/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest in late June resulted in an enormous surge in emergency department (ED) visits in the region, according to a new analysis from the CDC. There were 1,038 heat-related visits to the emergency department during the peak of the heat wave on June 28, in “region 10” — which includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska. In shocking comparison, there were just 9 similar ED visits in the region on the same day in 2019.

The northwest was home to a disproportionate number of emergency department visits

While much of the west was suffering through sweltering heat in June, the northwest was home to a disproportionate number of emergency department visits. Region 10 accounted for 15 percent of ED...

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How Netflix turned a slasher trilogy into a summer movie moment

Kiana Madeira and Gillian Jacobs in Fear Street Part 3: 1666. | Image: Netflix

In order to keep her roles straight, _Fear Street_star Kiana Madeira kept a big Five Star binder with her on set at most times. As part of the experimental slasher trilogy from Netflix, Madeira played two different roles across three movies, each set in a different time period. To make matters even more challenging, the schedule was incredibly compact: all three films were shot together over just a few months. So her binder served a crucial role. Inside were all three scripts, and she would write in it constantly.

“Every time we finished a scene, I would make notes about how it went, how my character was feeling, how I was feeling, what I think we ended with in terms of the tone and the trajectory of the story,” she says. “My binder...

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Uber agrees to reduced fine in fight over sexual assault data

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Uber has agreed to pay $9 million to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) after refusing to hand over data about riders and drivers who were sexually assaulted, and pay a separate $150,000 fine, according to a settlement agreement reached Thursday.

The CPUC will give $5 million of that money to the California Victim Compensation Fund, and the remaining $4 million will “go to address physical and sexual violence in the passenger carrier industry,” according to The San Francisco Chronicle, which reported on the agreement Thursday. Uber will also now provide data about the assaults to the CPUC, though it will remove any potentially identifying information.

The CPUC originally fined Uber $59 million in December 2020 and...

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Automattic, owner of Tumblr and WordPress.com, buys podcast app Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts has a new owner. Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and recently purchased Tumblr, announced today that it’s acquired Pocket Casts, the well-regarded podcast app. The blog post announcing the purchase didn’t offer much in the way of a preview, but it did tease potential future integrations.

“As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new),” the post states. “We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts.”

Pocket Casts launched in 2010 and sold to NPR and a group of other public media groups eight years later. It’s been well-received,...

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Among Us gets an official Irish translation

An ancient language and one of the most popular video games of the past year have collided with the launch of the official Irish localization of Among Us. The hugely popular sci-fi whodunnit game is now available to play in the Irish language as of this month.

The project was spearheaded by Úna-Minh Kavanagh, a fluent Irish speaker, writer, content creator, and Twitch streamer from Kerry in the southwest of Ireland. After her Twitter callout for an official version was met with an enthusiastic response, she was approached by Callum Underwood from Robot Teddy, the consulting firm supporting Innersloth developer Among Us. Kavanagh and a team of translators from across the globe got to work to turn their Irish modded version into an...

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Amazon Fire HD 10 (2021) review: things are getting complicated

Amazon’s big, cheap tablet can now be had many different ways

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The next big social network trend? Shortform audio

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Forget long Clubhouse convos, these founders see voice notes as the future

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Acer’s Chromebook Spin 713 is on sale for $619 at Best Buy

Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge

Whether you’d like to admit it or not, school is quickly approaching. And if you’re in need of a reliable laptop that won’t force you to completely deplete your savings, Chromebooks aren’t a bad way to go. The best Chromebooks deliver great value for the money, and many offer terrific performance for far less than you would pay for a more premium machine. Acer’s Chromebook Spin 713 is one such device, even if the high-end convertible is one of the more expensive Chromebooks on the market right now.

Currently discounted at Best Buy to $619, the 2021 model packs in 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an Intel 11th Gen Core i5, which is more than enough processing power for most people. Moreover, it boasts a great keyboard and a brilliant 3:2...

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The stakes for fighting misinformation are life and death

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The United States surgeon general published a report this week calling for a whole-of-society response to health misinformation, calling it a “serious threat to public health.” It took a sweeping look at a wide range of misinformation, on everything from masks to unproven drugs.

But the focus of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s remarks circled back to vaccines. Daily vaccination rates have stalled out at around 500,000 shots per day, and in many pockets of the country, a majority of people aren’t getting immunized. The US is struggling to bump those numbers up.

Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines spreads fast, and so do the accompanying consequences. The rapid spread of the more transmissible Delta coronavirus variant makes them...

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Alexa’s latest celebrity voices are Shaq and Melissa McCarthy

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Shaquille O’Neal and Melissa McCarthy are the latest celebrities to lend their voices to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, the company has announced. The two voices can provide weather reports, jokes, and personal stories when asked using the wake words “Hey Melissa” or “Hey Shaq.” Both voices cost $4.99 individually, and are rolling out in the US now.

Amazon kicked off its celebrity Alexa voices initiative with Samuel L. Jackson in 2019, and says this Alexa voice skill was the top selling digital purchase on Amazon.com the day it was launched. In 2020, the company followed up with Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. None of these celebrities replace Alexa’s default voice, but instead offer responses to specific requests.

If you’re after a...

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Epomaker’s NT68 is a mechanical alternative to your MacBook’s keyboard

The NT68 is designed to sit on top of your laptop’s existing keyboard. | Image: Epomaker

If you can’t stand to type on a Macbook’s scissor switch keyboard, let alone a butterfly model, and you don’t fancy lugging around one of the small number of laptops with a full-on mechanical keyboard built in, then Epomaker’s new wireless keyboard might be one for you. The NT68 is designed to sit on top of a MacBook or other laptop’s existing keyboard so your fingers don’t have to put up with their rubbery key switches for a single second longer than they need to.

It’s not an entirely new idea (Nuphy’s NuType F1 keyboard is another recent example) but the quality and specs of Epomaker’s previous keyboards make the NT68 worthy of attention. It can be hardwired over USB-C, connected via Bluetooth to up to three devices, and its switches...

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Xiaomi overtakes Apple as number two smartphone vendor for first time

A phone repair store at a technology market in Shenzhen, China. | Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge

Xiaomi is now the second largest smartphone vendor based on worldwide shipments in the second quarter of 2021, according to a new report from Canalys. The Chinese company captured 17 percent of global market share, according to the research firm, just behind Samsung’s 19 percent but ahead of Apple’s 14 percent.

BBK’s Oppo and Vivo rounded out the list of top five vendors at 10 percent apiece. All five companies grew their shipments year on year, but what’s notable is just how much Xiaomi has managed to increase its volume — it shipped 83 percent more phones than in Q2 2020, whereas Samsung grew shipments 15 percent and Apple by just one percent.

We've moved up one more spot! Just in from @Canalys, we are now the 2nd largest smartphone...

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Twitter adds captions to voice tweets more than a year after they first launched

Captions on a voice tweet. | Image: Twitter

Twitter is now rolling out captions for voice tweets, the company announced Thursday. Twitter first launched voice tweets in June 2020, but they were quickly criticized at the time by accessibility advocates for not having captions.

Now, when you make a voice tweet (something you can only do on the iOS app right now), captions will be automatically generated in supported languages, which are English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean, and Italian.

To see the captions on a tweet, you can click or tap the CC icon in the top-right corner of the voice tweet window. Captions only appear on new voice tweets, Twitter tells _The Verge,_so you won’t see them on older ones.

Below is a screenshot of...

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Valve’s Steam Deck: all the news about the new gaming handheld

Valve’s Steam Deck and its carrying case. | Image: Valve

Catch up on our coverage of Valve’s new device

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Intel is reportedly in talks to buy the $30 billion foundry company AMD spun off a decade ago

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In 2008, chipmakers Intel and AMD took two distinct paths: Intel kept manufacturing its own chips to maintain full control, while AMD decided to spin off its semiconductor business as GlobalFoundries, relying on it and other manufacturers to provide the actual silicon. Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Intel is looking to snap up AMD’s former fabs as well, in a deal that could value them at $30 billion.

It’s clear from the WSJ story that the deal isn’t a sure thing, and GlobalFoundries outright denied that it was in talks with Intel. But it’s possible Intel’s negotiating with the investment firm that owns GlobalFoundries instead, as the _WSJ_points out. It’s also intriguing that the Journal doesn’t have a “no comment” from...

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Jack Dorsey says Square has a new Bitcoin business named TBD

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Jack Dorsey, CEO of both Twitter and Square, is enough of a fan of cryptocurrency that Square’s push into the area won’t stop at releasing a hardware wallet. Instead, the company is creating a new business, to go with existing units like Tidal and Cash App, which is “focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services.”

Like our new #Bitcoin hardware wallet, we’re going to do this completely in the open. Open roadmap, open development, and open source. @brockm is leading and building this team, and we have some ideas around the initial platform primitives we want to build.

— jack (@jack) July 15, 2021

What does that mean...

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England footballer calls out weak response from social platforms after online abuse

A mural in support of England footballers Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka was unveiled in Manchester. The three were targeted with racist abuse online after the Euro 2020 final. | Photo by Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images

Bukayo Saka, a player on England’s national football team said in an Instagram post Thursday that social media platforms did not do enough to prevent the racist abuse he and his teammates were subjected to after the team’s loss to Italy.

“To the social media platforms @instagram@twitter@facebook I don’t want any child or adult to have to receive the hateful and hurtful messages that me Marcus and Jadon have received this week,” Saka wrote. “I knew instantly the kind of hate that I was about to receive and that is a sad reality that your powerful platforms are not doing enough to stop these messages.”

Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Saka, who are Black, were among England’s players to participate in a penalty shootout to decide the...

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How does Valve’s Steam Deck compare to the Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5?

Images: Valve

Valve’s surprising new Steam Deck has been officially announced, promising to let players take their whole Steam library of games on the go. But how does the handheld compare to other major consoles on the market, like the Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X / S, and the PlayStation 5?

First off, let’s look at the Steam Deck’s specs. It’s powered by an AMD APU with a quad-core / eight-thread Zen 2 CPU and an AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 8 compute units, alongside 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

There are three models available: one with 64GB of eMMC storage for $399, one with a 256GB NVMe SSD for $529, and a top-of-the-line model with 512GB of high-speed NVMe SSD storage for $649. While the base eMMC storage configuration could potentially mean slower game...

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Apple employees say the company is cracking down on remote work

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple employees say it’s harder than ever to get remote work requests approved after the company rolled out a new hybrid model that will require people to return to the office three days a week starting in early September. Some employees say they will quit if Apple doesn’t change its stance.

While Apple historically discouraged employees from working from home, there were one-off exceptions to the rule, and some teams were more lenient than others. Now, employees say that even those exceptions are being denied. In a company Slack channel where employees advocate for remote work, roughly 10 people said they were resigning due to the hybrid work policy or knew others who’d been forced to quit. The Slack channel currently has more than...

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Elgato announces new Stream Deck the same day Valve announces new Steam Deck

Elgato’s new Stream Deck, which is different from Valve’s Steam Deck. | Image: Elgato

Elgato’s Stream Deck is a popular tool for live-streamers, letting them set shortcuts and controls they can access with the push of a button, and the company announced a new model on Thursday, the Stream Deck MK. 2. This version brings a host of welcome improvements, including a detachable stand, interchangeable faceplates, and a removable USB-C cable. You can order it right now on Elgato’s website for $149.99.

While the Stream Deck MK. 2 does seem like a nice upgrade, it was announced on perhaps the worst possible day. Just a few hours ago, Valve made a huge splash by revealing its new handheld gaming console called the Steam Deck.

While they’re entirely different products, there’s sure to be some confusion about the names “Stream...

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Google adds option to instantly delete your last 15 minutes of search history

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is launching a new privacy feature for search that lets you instantly delete your last 15 minutes of search history on mobile, the company announced on Thursday. The new option was first revealed alongside several other search and Chrome improvements at I/O 2021 and is now rolling out to everyone.

The option to delete your last 15 minutes of search history is currently only available in Google’s iOS app and is headed to Android later this year. On desktop, your options for deleting searches are limited to setting your history to auto-delete every three, 18, or 36 months (18 months is the default for new accounts), or deleting searches by hand. You can see what the new option looks like in the iOS app below:

I...

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Old memes are Bill Murray, dodging them is Tilda Swinton

One of the photos from this Cannes photo shoot has been widely memed. Please make it stop. | Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage

Twitter said Thursday it was hearing from users who were seeing too many topic suggestions in their home timelines and was moving to remedy the situation. “We’re fixing that now, and will continue to improve Topics and find ways to show you the very best of Twitter. Things you want to see, that is,” its Support account tweeted. To its credit, Twitter has seemed more responsive to users’ complaints — or their lack of interest — of late; in addition to Thursday’s topics announcement, Twitter said this week it would kill off Fleets, its ephemeral disappearing tweets that apparently no one was using.

But instead of showing us more things we want to see, I think Twitter should lean into taking away things we don’t want. I have a suggestion...

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Video game handhelds didn’t die after all

Steam Deck. | Photo: Valve

When the beloved PlayStation Vita eventually died out, many blamed the rise of mobile gaming. “I think the PS Vita, while ahead of its time in many ways ... launched at exactly the wrong time in terms of market opportunity,” former Sony vice president of marketing John Koller told The Verge about going up against smartphones. But despite the Vita’s demise, dedicated gaming handhelds didn’t die out — in fact, the space is arguably as vibrant as ever.

Valve just announced the Steam Deck, a chunky portable PC that looks like a Sega Game Gear from a parallel universe. It’s designed to let players take their Steam library of PC games on the go. Just a few hours later, preorders opened for the latest iteration of the Nintendo Switch, one that...

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Self-driving startup Aurora will raise $2 billion in SPAC merger

Self-driving technology startup Aurora, which was founded by the former head of Google’s autonomous vehicle program, is the latest company to announce that it’s going public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC). The deal will give Aurora about $2 billion in new cash when it closes, which will help the startup in its quest to become a provider of self-driving hardware and software to companies in the trucking and ride-hailing industries.

Aurora is merging with a SPAC called Reinvent Technology Partners Y that’s already listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and is run by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, and investor Michael Thompson). That trio is also in the process of taking electric...

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Facebook’s payment system extends to online retailers in August

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Online shoppers will eventually see another option listed next to the usual payment methods, now that Facebook Pay will expand beyond the company’s own platforms. Not long after credit card companies dropped out of its Libra cryptocurrency project, Facebook launched its payments system for use across the main site, as well as WhatsApp and Instagram.

Image: Facebook

Facebook Pay is coming to online shopping.

Now, just like Google’s stored cards, PayPal integrations, Amazon Pay, and others, Facebook Pay is opening itself up for use in transactions with participating retailers. Shopify merchants are first in line to add the system on their sites, with others to follow after it launches in August. Interested...

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Elgato’s Facecam is a $200 webcam with streamer-friendly features

The Facecam includes a monitor mount, but you can also mount it to a tripod with its quarter-inch thread. | Photo: Elgato

Elgato has attempted to be the brand of choice for streamers and content creators who need gear to get started — even if it’s rarely the most affordable option. It makes its own LED lighting rig, multiple kinds of mounts for lights and mics, app-controlled adhesive light strips for your monitor or desk, sound-dampening pads for podcasting, a mouse pad that doubles as a green screen, and a lot more. Now, it has a $199.99 webcam to sell you.

The Elgato Facecam is a 1080p webcam that can record at up to 60 frames per second. It has a Sony Starvis CMOS sensor, with an eight-element prime fixed focus lens with an f/2.4 aperture, 24mm full-frame equivalent focal length, and up to an 82-degree field of view. The company says it’s great for...

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