Bird’s new electric bike looks like a VanMoof, and you can buy it

Shared electric scooter company Bird is branching out into new two-wheeled vehicles, namely electric bikes. A few months after it introduced its first shared e-bike, the company announced that it would also offer its own e-bike for sale.

The bike, dubbed Bird Bike of course, has a 500W rear hub motor, a Gates carbon belt drive, pedal- and throttle-assisted power, and the relatively modest sticker price of $2,299. Design-wise, the bike looks very similar to VanMoof’s popular e-bikes, with a slightly elongated top tube and embedded front and rear lights.

Bird, which was the first company to introduce shared electric scooters in a US city, has always flirted with the idea of e-bikes. The company first rolled out its Scoot-branded electric...

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Xbox game The Vale transports you to a medieval world through sound

Title screen of The Vale: Shadow of the Crown. | Image: Falling Squirrel

The Vale: Shadow of the Crown, an audio-based adventure game by indie studio Falling Squirrel, is available on Xbox and PC today for $19.99. The game was developed in collaboration with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and made for and tested by blind and low-vision players.

Players navigate a medieval setting as Alex, the blind second heir to a kingdom, who is on her way to the borderlands when her caravan is attacked by enemy soldiers. Left on her own, Alex has to travel the land, find weapons, learn spells, and fight enemies without sight.

Besides menus, which are presented in text and through audio description, the only visuals in _The Vale_are colored specks that float across a black screen. The behavior of the specks...

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Former Netflix engineers charged with insider trading

Three former Netflix engineers charged with insider trading | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged three former Netflix engineers with being part of a “long-running” insider trading scheme, the agency announced. The engineers and two close associates allegedly traded on confidential information about Netflix’s subscriber growth, generating more than $3 million in total profit.

According to the SEC complaint, while employed at Netflix in 2016 and 2017, Sung Mo “Jay” Jun tipped information about the streaming giant’s subscribers to his brother Joon Mo Jun and friend Junwoo Chon, who used the info to trade ahead of Netflix earnings announcements. After Sung Mo Jun left Netflix in 2017, the SEC alleges, he continued to get confidential information about the company’s subscriber...

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Smartwatch-induced health anxiety led one woman to run 916 ECGs in a year

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

One year after getting diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that causes an irregular heartbeat, a 70-year-old woman was back for another diagnosis: new-onset health anxiety triggered by her smartwatch. Despite not having concerning symptoms, the patient became more and more preoccupied with and worried about notifications from her watch. Over the one-year period, she took 916 ECG recordings through her device.

That patient isn’t an outlier, says Lindsey Rosman, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who wrote about the case in a new paper. She was just one example of a pattern seen in cardiology clinics. “Patients with underlying...

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Sweetheart deals and plastic knives: all the best emails from the Apple vs. Epic trial

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In May, the world watched as Epic Games dragged Apple to court, challenging the most profitable company in the world in the name of app fairness (and securing more Fortnite profits for itself). We’re still waiting for a verdict in Epic v. Apple, but we haven’t just been sitting around. We’ve also been digging through these companies’ dirty laundry, reading scores of internal emails and confidential presentations unearthed during the legal discovery process. It’s fascinating stuff.

In fact, we found dirt on a variety of other companies as well: Microsoft, Sony, Google, Nintendo, Valve, Netflix, Hulu, and many others were caught up in discovery, and many details of their businesses, strategies, and conversations with Apple and Epic are...

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Steve Jobs email confirms Apple was working on an ‘iPhone nano’

An iPhone 12 mini. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

In 2011, rumors swirled that Apple was working on a so-called “iPhone nano,” a new iPhone that would be smaller and cheaper than the top-of-the-line model at the time, the iPhone 4. While Apple never did release that rumored super-small phone, a Steve Jobs email we spotted while collecting the very best emails from the Epic v. Apple lawsuit confirms the company was indeed working on an iPhone nano at one point in time.

Unfortunately, Jobs’ October 2010 email, which is an agenda for a strategy meeting, doesn’t reveal much about the device. There’s a bullet for an “iPhone nano plan,” a sub-bullet for its “cost goal,” and another sub-bullet indicating that “Jony,” presumably Apple’s former design chief Jony Ive, would “show model (and/or...

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The Verge staff talks about their favorite laptop bags

Photo: Mission Workshop

It’s surprisingly how attached you can get to a bag — especially the bag that you use to carry your laptop, your sweater, your lunch, your notebook, your exercise shoes, and all the other stuff you need. Whether you’re heading to the office, visiting a friend, hanging in a coffee shop, going on a hike, or just sitting outdoors to read or work, having a bag that can accommodate everything on your “gotta have this” list can help you avoid a lot of aggravation.

We asked the staff of The Verge to tell us about their go-to laptop bags. We got a variety of answers, including messenger bags, camera bags, backpacks, well-worn bags that have lasted for years, and leather bags with lots of style.

So here are some stories about why we like our...

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Microsoft announces new wired Xbox stereo headset

Microsoft has unveiled a refreshed Xbox stereo headset, a $59.99 wired model that’s more affordable than its stellar $100 wireless headset that launched earlier in 2021. It’s launching on September 21st, and as is to be expected, it’s missing a few features. But much of its design is intact. You can twist the dial on the outside of the right ear cup to adjust the volume, and there’s a mute button on the back side of the flexible microphone — mirroring what you get with the wireless version. The stereo headset doesn’t appear to have the chat / game audio mixing dial on the left ear cup as the pricier model does, but that’s not a horrible loss given the price difference.

This headset connects through your Xbox controller via its bold green...

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Amazon reportedly plans to open department stores, starting in California and Ohio

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A year after The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon had an interest in using empty mall spaces as fulfillment centers, the business paper is back with a rumor that Amazon is planning to open department store-style locations of its own. The reported plan is for stores that are smaller than your average 100,000-square-foot Macy’s or JC Penney location, with a footprint that’s only about 30,000 square feet, which is closer to the size of Kohl’s stores that already handle Amazon returns. Without specific information on what they might sell, they could stock clothing, electronics, and household items.

While private equity firms did their part, Amazon is now in the odd position of replacing stores that it helped kill off. If the plans turn...

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Apple’s iPad Mini is $100 off today

The iPad mini is Apple’s smallest tablet | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The latest iPad Mini is back at Cyber Monday-level pricing, offering the best deal possible for Apple’s most compact tablet. Walmart has it on sale today for $100 off, clocking in at $299 and matching the lowest price we’ve seen for one of the most powerful small-format tablets on the market. The 64GB Wi-Fi model is perfect for casual reading, consuming content, controlling smart home functions, or just browsing the web on the couch on a nice 7.9-inch screen. Apple is expected to release a new model this fall, but here’s a prime opportunity to save on the current version right now. Read our review.

Yesterday saw the Steam release of Tetris Effect: Connected_on PC,_and if you plan on jumping in, it’s available for 25 percent off through...

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Dell’s first portable monitor looks like it was yanked off an XPS laptop

Dell

Dell has announced a 14-inch portable USB-C monitor that’s priced at $349.99 and will be released globally on August 31st. It has a 1080p LED-backlit IPS panel (60Hz refresh rate, 6ms response time) and you can use it as a secondary display for your USB-C laptop.

The monitor, which Dell refers to as the C1422H, has narrow bezels and a minimalist design that makes it look as if it came off an XPS laptop. It features a built-in stand that tilts between 10 and 90 degrees. The portable monitor weighs less than two pounds, and it can reach a peak brightness of 300 nits.

There’s a USB-C port on each side of the base, both of which can receive and pass through power; they can also handle a video feed via DisplayPort 1.2 alt mode. You can get...

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Corsair’s latest headset has improved comfort, but it backpedaled on sound

Corsair

Corsair impressed me last year with its $150 HS75 XB Wireless, an Xbox-exclusive wireless headset that looked and felt more like a high-end set of headphones than a gaming accessory. They also had great sound quality and an easy-to-learn button layout with the right amount of features. It wasn’t necessarily a flaw that they only worked with Xbox consoles, but no one likes to be excluded. The company has now released the HS80 RGB Wireless for the same $150 price _with_PlayStation compatibility, but these aren’t quite the successor that I was expecting or hoping for.

This one works with the PS4, PS5, as well as PC with its USB-A wireless transmitter. Unlike most wireless headsets that use a dongle like this, I couldn’t get it to work with...

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Intel shows off its answer to Nvidia’s DLSS, coming to Arc GPUs in 2022

Intel Arc is the company’s first big foray into dedicated gaming GPUs, coming in Q1 2022, but we got another preview at some of additional details for the upcoming graphics cards at the company’s Architecture Day 2021 event — including a first look at Intel’s AI-accelerated super sampling, now known as XeSS.

XeSS looks set to take on Nvidia’s own Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech, will make its debut alongside the first Arc GPU architecture, known as Alchemist, in early 2022. Much like DLSS, it will upscale games from a lower resolution to provide smoother frame rates without a noticeable compromise in image quality.

Intel is also using dedicated Xe-cores in its upcoming GPUs to power its XeSS technology, with dedicated Xe Matrix...

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Intel previews its Alder Lake chip, promises hybrid CPUs for desktops and laptops

Intel has spent much of 2021 announcing plans for its future: a new IDM 2.0 strategy, new naming schemes for its process nodes, and new desktop GPUs. At Intel’s Architecture Day 2021, we finally got a preview of how some of those changes are coming together in new chips, starting with the upcoming Alder Lake lineup later this year.

As the company has been teasing since last year’s Architecture Day, Alder Lake will feature Intel’s latest hybrid architecture: instead of simply offering the next generation of powerful Intel CPU cores, it’ll offer a mix of both performance and efficiency x86 cores, both of which Intel previewed as part of its announcements.

Additionally, Alder Lake will be the first chip released on Intel’s newly renamed...

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GM and AT&T are teaming up to bring 5G to Chevy, Cadillac, and GMC cars by 2024

General Motors and AT&T are partnering to bring 5G connectivity to “millions” of vehicles over the next decade. The improved connectivity will mean better software performance, enhanced navigation, and faster music and video streaming capabilities, company officials said.

Starting with model year 2024, all Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC vehicles will come equipped with 5G. In addition, all of GM’s current model year 2019 and newer vehicles, which are equipped with 4G LTE, will experience “faster connectivity speeds and many of the same performance benefits of future 5G-equipped vehicles” thanks to GM’s fifth-generation cellular network architecture.

In other words, cars made in 2019 and beyond will have improved data speeds and software...

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Binance is facing an unconventional new legal claim over May 19th outage

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A group of disgruntled investors is pursuing a formal claim against the cryptocurrency platform Binance for allegedly causing millions in damages through an unanticipated outage earlier this year. Filed in an international business arbitration court, the case represents the largest investor action ever brought against a cryptocurrency platform, and a major test of the rights of investors speculating in digital currency markets.

The case stems from a widespread service outage on May 19th, which coincided with a massive drop in the price of Bitcoin. Binance wasn’t the only platform affected, as a mass selloff clogged blockchain transactions and overwhelmed reserves, but the complex financial products offered by the platform made the damage...

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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 review: flipping into the mainstream

Third time is maybe the charm

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Ghost of Tsushima’s purring cats might be my favorite PS5 feature

Since the PlayStation 5 debuted, we’ve seen lots of novel uses of its DualSense controller. Game developers have utilized the haptic vibrations to simulate weather like falling rain or blowing wind, while the added resistance in the triggers makes firing a weapon or making an exhausted NBA star sprint all the more immersive. Often these features help make seemingly small interactions feel more notable — and my favorite new example is the cats in Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut on the PS5.

The new version isn’t really a director’s cut, at least in the typical sense, but rather an enhanced version of the open-world samurai game that originally launched as the last big PS4 exclusive in 2020. That game married a fairly standard open-world...

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Fossil’s upcoming Wear OS smartwatch leaks with Snapdragon 4100 Plus

Fossil’s Gen 6 smartwatch. | Image: WinFuture

Fossil’s upcoming Gen 6 smartwatch has leaked thanks to a retailer listing spotted by WinFuture. Notably, it appears to be Fossil’s first smartwatch with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus processor, which launched last year but has so far only appeared on a handful of devices. The new watch follows Fossil’s Gen 5 lineup, which dates back to 2019, and received new LTE-equipped models this year.

The Gen 6 will be Fossil’s first Wear OS smartwatch since Google announced it was collaborating with Samsung on the third-generation of its operating system. But based on currently available information, the wearable is unlikely to launch with the new software. When Google announced its Wear OS 3 update plans in July it said that Fossil’s...

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Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work

Facebook

Facebook is bringing the office to VR with Horizon Workrooms

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DTS’s Play-Fi multiroom audio platform is getting a big home theater upgrade

Image: DTS

Play-Fi, the multiroom audio platform from DTS, is getting a home theater upgrade with Play-Fi Home Theater, a new set of wireless audio features designed to cut down on the amount of cables needed when using a TV with external speakers. Play-Fi Home Theater works using a TV’s built-in Wi-Fi with “no adapters, no dongles, and no add-on boxes” according to DTS, and is launching with as-yet unnamed TVs in the third quarter of this year.

DTS’s Play-Fi standard has been around for close to a decade, and is designed to let you build up a multiroom audio setup using speakers and other components from different manufacturers. That’s in contrast to systems like Sonos, which only streams to Sonos-branded equipment. The standard can already be...

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The four numbers Apple won’t let you engrave on your iPhone in China

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple is censoring words and phrases customers can engrave on products in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, according to a new report by the Brussels-based CitizenLab. The iPhone-maker has always said it filters engraving requests to avoid racist language, vulgarities, or intellectual property violations, but CitizenLab says the company’s restrictions of political references in Hong Kong and Taiwan particularly go above and beyond legal requirements.

“We found that part of Apple’s mainland China political censorship bleeds into both Hong Kong and Taiwan,” write the report’s authors. “Much of this censorship exceeds Apple’s legal obligations in Hong Kong, and we are aware of no legal justification for the political censorship of content in...

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What Twitter should copy from Tinder

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

You’ll likely be able to verify yourself twice on Tinder before you can do it once anywhere else

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Nvidia expects GPU supply constraints for the ‘vast majority’ of 2022

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 GPU. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Nvidia warned earlier this year that the great GPU shortage would last throughout 2021, and now the company expects supply issues to continue well into 2022. Speaking on Nvidia’s Q2 fiscal 2022 earnings call this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he expects supply constraints for the majority of next year.

“I would expect that we will see a supply-constrained environment for the vast majority of next year is my guess at the moment,” said Huang according to a transcript of the call, spotted by Videocardz. Nvidia has committed to securing long-term supply commitments, but demand is still higher than supply right now during a global chip shortage.

Nvidia’s warnings of a GPU shortage well into 2022 might not seem as bad as they sound,...

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Nvidia admits acquisition of British chip designer Arm may take longer than 18 months

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had admitted for the first time that the company’s planned acquisition of British chip designer Arm may take longer than the initially-scheduled 18 months. The acquisition, which would bring together two of the most powerful chip companies in the world, is facing scrutiny from regulators in the US, UK, and China.

“Our discussions with regulators are taking longer than initially thought, so it’s pushing out the timetable,” Huang told The Financial Times. “It’s not one particular delay,” he added. “But we’re confident in the deal, we’re confident regulators should recognise the benefits of the acquisition.”

“Our discussions with regulators are taking longer than initially thought”

Huang was previously unwavering...

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Jabra’s new true wireless earbuds are designed to help cope with hearing loss

The Jabra Enhance Plus. | Image: Jabra

Jabra’s Enhance Plus are a new pair of true wireless earbuds aimed at helping people who experience “mild-to-moderate” hearing loss. They’re meant as a half-step towards a more traditional hearing aid solution, for people who might not be ready to wear a device all day. The Enhance Plus will be released first in the US at the end of the year, and will be sold through licensed hearing care professionals at a price that’s yet to be announced.

Although Jabra is perhaps best known for its true wireless earbuds like the Elite 85T, its parent company GN Group has a long history in the hearing aid business. Now Jabra is also getting involved. It announced a new hearing aid lineup in June, and last year it added a hearing test feature to its...

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Oppo introduces true continuous zoom lens for smartphones

Oppo has held a “Future Imaging Technology Launch Event” online today to make some camera-related announcements, following the reveal of its “next-generation” under-display selfie camera earlier this month.

Oppo is known for demonstrating camera tech in prototype form long before it hits the market. The company was the first to demonstrate periscope telephoto cameras and under-display cameras, for example, both of which are increasingly common on high-end devices.

The first new announcement is a telephoto lens with continuous optical zoom. Unlike periscope telephoto lenses used today, the lens elements move throughout the 85-200mm-equivalent zoom range meaning that the images should be crisp at every focal length without...

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NFTs, explained

Image: Cryptokitties.co

There’s nothing like an explosion of blockchain news to leave you thinking, “Um… what’s going on here?” That’s the feeling I’ve experienced while reading about Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or about Nyan Cat being sold as one. And by the time we all thought we sort of knew what the deal was, the founder of Twitter put an autographed tweet up for sale as an NFT. Now, months after we first published this explainer, we’re still seeing headlines about people paying house-money for clip art of rocks — and my mom still doesn’t really understand what an NFT is.

You might be wondering: what is an NFT, anyhow?

After literal hours of reading, I think I know. I also think I’m going to cry.

Okay, let’s start with the basics:

What is an...

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Feiyu one-ups DJI by letting you stick its tiny self-balancing camera to anything you like

Half a decade ago, dronemaker DJI realized its miniature aerial steadicams might be handy to carry around on foot — but it’s not the only company monopolizing on the shrinking tech. Rival FeiyuTech now has a DJI Pocket competitor that ups the ante by letting you detach the entire motorized gimbal, so you can stick a lightweight self-balancing camera to your car, helmet, wrist, or any magnetic surface up to three feet away.

It’s called the FeiyuTech Pocket 2S, and it’s on crowdfunding site Indiegogo right now for $399, or a little less if you take advantage of its early bird discounts.

According to the company, the camera shoots up to 4K footage at 60 fps with a Sony IMX 317 sensor, and can do up to 3 hours of continuous recording at...

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Netflix is finally adding support for spatial audio on iPhone and iPad

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Netflix is beginning to roll out support for Apple’s spatial audio feature on iPhone and iPad, the streaming giant said to 9to5Mac on Wednesday. A Netflix spokesperson confirmed the rollout to _The Verge,_saying that the rollout begins Wednesday and that users should expect to see it over the next few days. You may have it already — some users on Reddit are reporting that it’s working for them.

Apple’s spatial audio, which you can only take advantage of with the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max on an iPhone or iPad, is designed to make you feel more immersed in what you’re listening to with an impressive surround sound effect. If you want to give spatial audio a shot and don’t have it on Netflix yet, you can try it out on other services like...

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