Sony’s new PS5 model weighs less because it has a smaller heatsink

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

A new PS5 model started appearing in Australia, Japan, and parts of the US earlier this month, with a new stand design and a mysterious reduction in weight. Thanks to a teardown video from YouTuber Austin Evans, the mystery has now been solved: Sony has changed the heatsink that helps cool the PS5.

The new heatsink is significantly smaller than the original, and makes up for the entire weight reduction of 300 grams (0.6 pounds), according to Evans. It’s not clear why Sony has swapped out the heatsink so early on in the PS5’s lifecycle, but Evans does note that his particular unit ran hotter as a result — with rear exhaust temperatures around 3 to 5 degrees higher. That could be down to manufacturing variance, though.

I...

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T-Mobile CEO calls latest data breach ‘humbling,’ claims it’s committed to security

A recent T-Mobile data breach coughed up the information of more than 50 million people, including some who aren’t current customers or never were. The 21-year-old hacker who says they’re responsible for the attack already did an interview with the Wall Street Journal calling its security “awful,” and now CEO Mike Sievert is speaking out.

This is T-Mobile’s fifth incident in four years

Sievert says he’s taking a moment to update us now that the breach is contained and the investigation is “substantially complete.” “Keeping our customers’ data safe is a responsibility we take incredibly seriously and preventing this type of event from happening has always been a top priority of ours,” he writes.

It’s true that these attacks happen to many...

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Elizabeth Holmes’ defense likely includes testimony accusing her ex-partner of abuse

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes leaves the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building with her defense team in downtown San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, May 4, 2021. | Photo by Nhat V. Meyer/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images

With just a few days left until Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes faces criminal fraud charges at trial, newly unsealed court documents (via NPR) reveal evidence that her lawyers may cite in her defense.

If you don’t remember the details from the scandal as described in a book, documentary, and more than one podcast series, Theranos told investors it developed revolutionary blood test technology capable of amazing results based on just a few small drops. Theranos had been valued at as much as $9 billion before reports exposed its inaccurate results and use of modified machines by other companies to perform crucial testing instead of its own Edison device. The company folded in 2016, and federal prosecutors charged Holmes and Balwani...

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Microsoft is threatening to withhold Windows 11 updates if your CPU is old

Yesterday, we wrote how Microsoft’s Windows 11 won’t technically leave millions of PCs behind — the company told us it won’t actually block you from installing Windows 11 on a PC with an older CPU, so long as you download and manually install an ISO file all by yourself. But it turns out even that technicality has a technicality. Microsoft is now threatening to withhold Windows Updates from your copy of Windows 11 — potentially even security updates — if you take that route.

We’re not sure why the company didn’t mention it in our original briefing, but Microsoft has since told _The Verge_that unsupported PCs won’t be entitled to receive Windows Updates, and that even security and driver updates may be withheld.

CYA or genuine threat?

I...

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Google allegedly offered Netflix a break on the usual Play Store commission

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

An antitrust lawsuit filed against Google and its Play Store by several state attorneys general echoed the Epic vs. Apple battle, and a new document highlights how and why Google’s app store is so similar. MLex senior correspondent Michael Acton points out the new complaint, which arrived Friday night from lawyers appointed to represent consumers (that’s us) in a potential class-action lawsuit that joins the states and Epic Games in accusing Google of abusing its monopoly power and of anti-competitive behavior.

Image: MLex, CONSOLIDATED FIRST AMENDED CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT, CASE NO. 3:20-CV-05761-JD - 42

Perhaps most telling is a mention that popular subscription services like Spotify, Netflix, and Tinder have tried...

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Apple’s MagSafe charger and the latest GoPro highlight this weekend’s best deals

MagSafe makes for a convenient charger around the house

The ecosystem of MagSafe chargers for the iPhone 12 might not be very expansive, but it’s hard to go wrong with Apple’s base magnetic wireless charger — especially when it’s discounted to $30 at Amazon. The magnetic puck can provide the iPhone 12 Mini with up to 12 watts of power or the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro with up to 15 watts, so long as you use a 20-watt power brick. It can also top off other iPhones that support wireless charging without magnets. In fact, it can power up any device that supports Qi charging, including AirPods.

It’s not too late to seek out some fun and adventure before the summer winds down, and this GoPro deal could help you document it. The GoPro Hero 9 Black is a rugged little action cam capable of capturing 5K...

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The App Store is too big to change

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple made waves this week by announcing a $100 million settlement with small app developers who sued the company. But despite the changes announced yesterday, nothing is really changing for developers — the App Store is too big and too reliant on in-app purchase fees for that to happen.

Apple’s settlement includes several new policies that it says “clarif[y]” the App Store’s rules. Developers can now contact customers about alternative payment methods using data collected from their app (so long as the notification itself is done outside their apps), which they had previously been barred from doing. Apple promises to keep the App Store Small Business Program, which reduces Apple’s revenue cut down to 15 percent for developers who make...

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If your iPhone 12’s earpiece failed, Apple might fix it for free

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple has announced a service program to fix failing receivers on iPhone 12 and 12 Pros (via 9to5Mac). The company says that non-Mini or Max phones made between October 2020 and April 2021 may have an issue where no sound comes out of the earpiece when making or receiving calls, and that it’ll fix the issue for free as part of the new program. According to Apple, the problem is caused by a component in the receiver module failing.

Apple’s page says that only a “very small percentage” of devices may be affected. While it can be hard to tell what Apple means by “small percentage” (it infamously used the phrase when describing the number of butterfly keyboards that experienced issues), it doesn’t appear that the earpiece issue is widespread...

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Paramount Plus orders new series Players from American Vandal creators

Image: ViacomCBS

Paramount Plus has ordered a new documentary-style comedic series titled Players that will delve into a fictional professional League of Legends esports team.

The series is co-created and executive produced by Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault, the comedic minds behind Netflix’s critical breakout_American Vandal_, which memorably gave us a pair of riveting — albeit disturbed — mysteries about fictional crimes involving dick vandalism and the mastermind behind an explosive diarrhea incident.

Players, also a mockumentary, will follow an esports team gunning for a championship after years of misfortune. The series will involve a clash of egos between a 17-year-old rookie, the team’s “prodigy,” and a veteran 27-year-old. What could possibly go...

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Chicago sues DoorDash and Grubhub for ‘unfair and deceptive’ practices

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The city of Chicago has sued food delivery services DoorDash and Grubhub for allegedly using deceptive and unfair tactics that hurt restaurants during the coronavirus pandemic. The two lawsuits accuse the services of a panoply of misconduct, including falsely advertising delivery services for restaurants without their consent, charging misleading fees to customers, and hiding the costs that they added to a meal.

“It is deeply concerning and unfortunate that these companies broke the law during these incredibly difficult times, using unfair and deceptive tactics to take advantage of restaurants and consumers who were struggling to stay afloat,” said Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who filed the complaints alongside Acting Business Affairs...

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TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook are struggling with ivermectin misinformation

Ivermectin tablets. | Photo by Soumyabrata Roy/NurPhoto via Getty Images

TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook are dealing with waves of content about ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug that has picked up traction among anti-vaxxers as a COVID-19 treatment. Sales of ivermectin meant for animals, as well as calls to poison control centers, have increased enough that the FDA issued a consumer update explaining why people shouldn’t take it to treat or prevent COVID-19.

You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4

— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021

On TikTok, Rolling Stone found videos, some of which had more than a million views, promoting ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment under tags like #ivermectin4covid and #ivermectinworks. TikTok has since removed the videos for...

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The Windows 11 upgrade situation just got less and more confusing

In June, we wrote that Windows 11 will leave millions of PCs behind, seemingly because their processors aren’t as new and fully featured as Microsoft would like.

This morning, Microsoft revealed a change of plan to The Verge: it won’t technically abandon those millions of PCs, because you’ll be able to manually install the downloadable Windows 11 ISO on whatever you want. The company’s also extending its official CPU compatibility list to a bunch of Intel’s most expensive Xeon workstation processors and its most expensive line of Core X desktop CPUs — and, tellingly, the less powerful Intel chip it shipped in its Surface Studio 2, so it no longer has to defend the idea of abandoning a flagship product that it still continues to sell...

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Peloton says it’s subject to DOJ, DHS, and SEC investigations into Tread Plus injuries

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Peloton has said that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have subpoenaed it for documents and information related to its reporting on injuries caused by its Tread Plus treadmill (via ABC News). The company released this information in its annual 10-K form, citing the investigations by the agencies, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as risks to be disclosed to its investors. You can read excerpts of the document below.

[A]s previously disclosed, we have received reports of a number of injuries associated with our Tread+ product, one of which led to the death of a child. In April 2021, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (“CPSC”) issued a warning to consumers about...

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COVID surge causes liquid oxygen problems for SpaceX, water utilities

A liquid oxygen tank parked outside a field hospital in New York in April, 2020 | Photo by BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images

Demand for oxygen to treat COVID-19 patients is spiking during the latest pandemic surge, leaving liquid oxygen in short supply for other uses, including water purification and rocket launches. As supplies get redirected to hospitals, other industries are scrambling to figure out alternatives.

“We’re actually going to be impacted this year with the lack of liquid oxygen for launch,” Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, said earlier this week. “We certainly are going to make sure the hospitals are going to have the oxygen that they need, but for anybody who has liquid oxygen to spare, send me an email.”

“anybody who has liquid oxygen to spare, send me an email”

While oxygen is extremely common in the atmosphere, hospitals need high...

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Xbox engineer fixes user’s profile picture, makes the world a better place

Microsoft

At times, Twitter can be a bad place, amplifying some of the worst opinions and people on the internet. But on some days, the platform can remind us there are still decent humans doing good work to make the world a better, less shitty place.

Long ago, an Xbox user who goes by Noukon on Twitter purchased a Pac-Man ghost avatar for a dollar. Over the years, as the Xbox user interface underwent changes and iterations, Noukon’s avatar got smaller and smaller until it was little more than a tiny blue square lost in the endless gray sea of the Xbox avatar display. Dismayed yet defiant, Noukon shared his problem on Twitter but expressed resolve to keep the cherished avatar.

“I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006,” Noukon tweeted....

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Vergecast: 10 years of Tim Cook, iPhone 13 rumors, and the OnlyFans decision

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales

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 Vergecast,_Nilay, Dieter, and managing editor Alex Cranz talk with senior reporter Adi Robertson about why OnlyFans planned to prohibit sexually explicit content on its platform and then quickly reversed its decision days later.

In the second half of the show, the crew pivots to discuss Tim Cook’s first 10 years as Apple CEO and the rumors about some Apple products coming this fall.

There’s a whole lot more in this episode — like a new gadget to remix Kanye West songs and Elon Musk’s humanoid Tesla robots — so listen...

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Lordstown Motors taps Hertz board member to right the ship

Lordstown Motors has hired a new CEO, Daniel Ninivaggi, just two months after its previous chief executive and founder resigned after misleading investors. Ninivaggi comes from an automotive background and recently wrapped up a seven-year stint as a member of Hertz’s board of directors, where he helped oversee the rental car company’s very public bankruptcy and restructuring.

That experience could come in handy. Lordstown Motors needs someone at the helm who can steer the company through the adversity that lies ahead — including, mainly, surviving past early 2022, which is when the startup says it expects to deliver its first electric pickup trucks _and_when it will also run out of money unless it finds new funding. But Lordstown Motors’ s...

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Microsoft won’t stop you installing Windows 11 on older PCs

Microsoft is announcing today that it won’t block people from installing Windows 11 on most older PCs. While the software maker has recommended hardware requirements for Windows 11 — which it’s largely sticking to — a restriction to install the OS will only be enforced when you try to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 through Windows Update. This means anyone with a PC with an older CPU that doesn’t officially pass the upgrade test can still go ahead and download an ISO file of Windows 11 and install the OS manually.

Microsoft announced its Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements in June, and made it clear that only Intel 8th Gen and beyond CPUs were officially supported. Microsoft now tells us that this install workaround is...

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There’s a tiny tube amp in this super pricey Astell & Kern music player

Astell & Kern

Astell & Kern’s latest portable music player is as high-tech as it is extravagantly expensive. The $2,399 A&ultima SP2000T releases in October, and it stands out from the brand’s previous models like the Kann and Kann Cube with a new triple amp system. These things are never affordable, and the price might seem especially out there if you’re content with listening to music from a streaming service on your phone. But there’s some real engineering swagger in effect here.

Astell & Kern managed to fit a tiny tube amp inside of this device. Specifically, it uses a Korg Nutube 6P1, which conceptually operates just like larger tube amps, only it’s small enough to fit in a device that can go in your pocket. To avoid any interference that the...

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Peloton drops the price of its original Bike by $400 amid poor earnings results

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Peloton has dropped the price of its original Bike by $400, making it $1,495. This price reduction comes alongside the company’s 2021 financial earnings, which showed that the company grew less than expected, and lost more than it had predicted (via CNBC). The company reports that in the fourth quarter of its 2021 financial year, it had a net loss of just over $313 million.

While the company’s financial results certainly give it a reason to want to boost growth, this isn’t the original Peloton Bike’s first price drop. Its previous price point of $1,895 was the result of a price drop that happened alongside the introduction of the Bike Plus last September, which took it down from its original $2,245 price tag.

Peloton says it wants to...

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Rivian files to go public at up to a reported $80 billion valuation

Image: Rivian

Buzzy (and extremely well-funded) EV startup Rivian has filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. Rivian will be doing a traditional initial public offering, bucking the recent trend of electric vehicles going public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

The company, which is backed by Amazon and Ford, announced that it submitted a draft registration statement for the IPO in a press release. The draft will initially remain confidential, though Bloomberg has reported that Rivian is seeking a valuation as high as $80 billion. The IPO date is expected to be sometime before the end of this year. When it happens, Rivian will add to a fundraising war chest that is already over $10...

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Toyota pauses self-driving ‘e-Palette’ service after one crashed into an Olympic athlete

Toyota has halted its autonomous shuttle service in Tokyo’s Olympic village after one of its vehicles collided with a visually impaired athlete, _Reuters_reported. Technically, the vehicle was not driving autonomously but was under manual control at the time of the incident.

Toyota had been operating dozens of its “e-Palette” shuttles during the Olympics as a demonstration of a far-out concept the company first showed off in 2018. Back then, the automaker said its e-Palettes, which are modular battery-electric vehicles without traditional controls like steering wheels or pedals, could operate either as ride-hailing shuttles or mobile retail spaces.

Toyota saw the Olympics as an opportunity to demonstrate its new technology. The boxy...

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Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga review: a promising start

A laptop that knows its business

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Google’s new ad goes full Jony Ive on the Pixel 5A headphone jack

Yesterday marked the release of Google’s $449 Pixel 5A with 5G, and the company has just released a two-minute video that celebrates one of the phone’s very best hardware features. No, it’s not the new IP67 dust and water resistance. It’s not the larger screen or the biggest battery in a Pixel yet.

It’s all about the headphone jack, or “the circle” as this very Jony Ive-esque spot constantly refers to it. Google is truly getting out there with its YouTube advertising, and you’ve probably never seen a video about a headphone jack quite like this. I mean, the ad uses footage of a space station docking to underline the “satisfying feeling of click” you get when plugging headphones into Google’s latest phone.

My favorite part is when it...

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Razer gaming mice, headsets, and more are discounted at Amazon

The Razer Basilisk Ultimate is just one of many big sales in today’s roundup

A wide variety of Razer gaming accessories are a featured deal of the day today at Amazon. It’s advertised to get you “up to 30 percent off,” but there are deeply discounted products with items marked down as much as 40, 50, and 60 percent. Some notable ones to check out are the Razer Basilisk Ultimate wireless mouse for $94.99, the BlackShark V2 wired headset for $79.99, and the Huntsman TE TKL keyboard for $79.99.

Amazon-owned Eero launched its Eero 6 line of Wi-Fi 6 mesh routers late last year, and today it's on sale for a new low price that even beats the recent Prime Day discount. You can pick up the Eero 6 router and two extenders at Amazon for $195, a 30 percent discount. If you’re not familiar with mesh networks, they can be...

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Waymo will no longer sell its ‘Laser Bear Honeycomb’ lidar sensors to other companies

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

Waymo is getting out of the lidar selling business. The Alphabet-owned company said it would no longer sell its laser sensors to other companies, ending a nearly three-year-old revenue stream for the self-driving leader. The news was first reported by The Information.

Lidar, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, are laser sensors that are seen as an essential component for self-driving cars. The sensors are placed on the roofs of autonomous vehicles, as well as the sides and grilles, where they send out thousands of laser points to map the surrounding environment.

Waymo first began manufacturing its own lidar sensors in early 2017 as a way to dramatically reduce the costs of its autonomous vehicle business. At the time, the...

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A Twitter outage cut off the Midwest this morning

Illustration by Alex Castro

For slackers west of the Appalachians there was some bad news — Twitter went down. An outage unplugged many people beyond the East Coast of the US starting at around 8:30AM ET, with reports from as far north as Toronto and as far south as Arkansas.

Image: DownDetector.com

DownDetector Twitter outage reports.

Twitter has not updated its status page to note any particular issue, but DownDetector and other social media platforms are hosting the suddenly silenced voices of your favorite Midwestern cities. Since I live in Michigan, I’ve one of them, which didn’t make this any easier to figure out. There don’t appear to be any wider CDN problems or issues with a cloud service like AWS, but remember, the answer is...

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The payments mess that almost scared OnlyFans away from sex work

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

When paying for porn gets complicated

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Six things we learned about Elden Ring

More details on the collaboration between George R.R Martin and FromSoftware

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Twitter starts launching Ticketed Spaces for some iOS users

Image: Twitter

Twitter is beginning its rollout of Ticketed Spaces, or paid live audio rooms. The company announced yesterday that it’s “experimenting” with the feature for some iOS users. It first rolled out applications to try the product in June with the plan to eventually make it available to all interested iOS and Android users.

“Know it’s taking us a little time, but we want to get this right for you,” Twitter wrote in its announcement yesterday.

Hosts can charge between $1 and $999 for their ticketed rooms and can also set a room size cap for them. These test group participants will initially keep 97 percent of the money they make, after the fee Apple and Google charge for in-app purchases. But Twitter will increase its cut from 3 percent to 20...

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