Ford made a premium gas fragrance for EV owners who miss the smell of fossil fuels

My face when I sniff gas...perfume. | Photo: Ford, Christopher Ison

So you just dropped a cool $59,000 on a Ford Mustang Mach-E GT, your own sporty slice of our electric future, made by a company that only knows how to build them tough (Ford Tough, to be precise). What happens when you go to plug in your new car and you miss that telltale whiff of chemical-y gasoline smell wafting from its insides? According to Ford, you substitute it with a “premium fragrance” inspired by gasoline called “Mach-Eau.”

Mach-Eau — the name does not get better the more I type it — was born from a survey conducted by Ford Europe that found that 1 in 5 drivers will miss the “smell of petrol most” when they switch to an electric car. Naturally, wanting to push more Mach-Es and F-150 Lightnings into the world, Ford settled on an...

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How to change your iPhone’s text size for a specific app

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg

Sometimes you want the text in your app to be smaller, so you can fit more content on a single screen. Sometimes you want it to be bigger, especially if you’ve been putting off buying those reading glasses. But until recently, if you had an iPhone, you had to pick a single text size as a standard for all your apps.

Not anymore. In iOS 15, you can adjust the text size separately for each of your apps. So you can, for example, keep the text small for your email, but make it a bit larger in Twitter — or vice versa. (Thanks to @OmarShahine for the info.)

One of the best hidden new iOS 15 features is per app font sizes. I like to use the smallest dynamic size system wide but bump up Outlook by one side since I read so much email. p...

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Virginia will invest $700 million to bring broadband to every household in the state

Image: Alex Castro / The Verge

On Friday, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced that the state plans to invest $700 million in American Rescue Plan funding to reach universal broadband connectivity by 2024. This new investment shaves four years off of the governor’s original plan to connect every household to high-speed broadband.

The pandemic dramatically affected the ways in which people work and attend school — pushing many office-holders to renew efforts to ensure citizens are able to get online. According to Northam, more than 233,000 homes and businesses in Virginia are without broadband access.

“Not just a luxury for some, but an essential utility for all”

“It’s time to close the digital divide in our Commonwealth and treat Internet service like the 21st...

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There’s enough Steam Deck demand to take Steam’s store down

Steam Deck multiplayer | Image: Valve

Valve officially revealed its handheld PC gaming machine only a day ago, but that was apparently enough to spread the word — when the Steam Deck went up for preorder today at 1PM ET, the demand from gamers knocked Steam for a loop as the store produced error after error. Seemingly every step produced another pitfall: two-factor authentication if you weren’t signed in, some signed-in accounts had to sign in once again, credit card checks, even a wonky response from a system that pegged long-established Steam accounts as being “too new” to participate.

Other parts of Steam got flaky during the crush of preorder interest, too. The entire Steam store, Steam’s community pages, and the age gate that lets you view mature-rated titles didn’t...

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Google redesigns its emoji to be more universal and authentic

992 of Google’s emoji designs are receiving tweaks. | Image: Google

Google is tweaking 992 of its emoji designs to make them more “universal, accessible, and authentic,” the company announced today. The new designs will arrive this fall alongside Android 12, but Google says they’ll also be available on older versions with apps that use its Appcompat compatibility layer. They’re also coming to other Google platforms like Gmail, Chrome OS, Google Chat, and YouTube Live Chat this month.

None of the changes are particularly drastic. Instead, they’re mostly the kinds of tweaks that make the meaning of each emoji easier to understand at a glance by a wider range of people. The pie emoji, for example, currently looks like a classic American pumpkin pie. That’s fine for Americans, but it means that, in the UK,...

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How to use SharePlay

The headline feature for Apple’s fall updates (including iOS 15, iPadOS 15, tvOS 15, and macOS Monterey) is SharePlay. It’s a new software feature on top of FaceTime that allows you to watch and listen to movies, TV shows, music, podcasts, and more with friends and family while video chatting.

Right now, the number of SharePlay-compatible apps is a pretty small list: the Apple TV app for movies and TV shows, the Apple Music app for music, and Apple’s Podcasts app for podcasts. The company is promising some bigger third-party partners when iOS 15 launches this fall, including HBO Max, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, TikTok, and Twitch. Some big names seem to be skipping out for now, though: most notably, Netflix and YouTube.

For now, if...

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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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