The best early Black Friday deals on Apple devices

The AirPods Pro with the MagSafe charging case are on sale for just $190 at Amazon. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Ironically, if you’re looking for a great Apple deal this Black Friday season, you shouldn’t shop at Apple. That’s because Apple doesn’t typically offer discounts on its new products in-store or on its website, at least outside of the occasional educational discount. Don’t fear, however, as there are plenty of reliable third-party retailers like Amazon, B&H Photo, and Best Buy that do.

Even better, these retailers have already started discounting some of the most popular Apple products ahead of Black Friday, dropping prices on everything from the latest MacBook Pro to the Apple Watch Series 7. Below, we’ve rounded up the best deals we’ve found by category, and we’ll continue to update this piece as more deals are published.

Also, if...

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Vergecast: Apple assists DIY repairs, Russia blows up a satellite, and Biden signs infrastructure bill

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

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.

We’ve got a well-rounded episode of _The Vergecast_today with everything from policy to space to consumer tech.

In the first segment, Nilay and Dieter bring in Verge policy reporter Makena Kelly to talk about President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package and what it can do to improve broadband access in the US.

In segment two, Verge senior science reporter Loren Grush joins the show to explain why Russia destroyed one of their own satellites with a ground-based missile and how it’s causing concern in the space community.

_Verge_M...

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The best Black Friday tech deals under $50

Keeping it thrifty and under 50 | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

What can $50 get you these days? Turns out, quite a lot; you just need to know where to look. We’ve already rounded up all the best early Black Friday deals for getting your shopping done early at retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. But if you’re on a tight budget or looking for some gifts that won’t break the bank, you’ve come to the right place.

Amazon’s latest streaming stick is a solid alternative to both Roku and Chromecast devices. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max is currently enjoying a $20 discount at Amazon, bringing the final price down to just $35. In our review, Chris Welch stated that “the improvements are minor but worth the extra cash.” Armed with an extensive library of viewing apps, the Fire TV stick remains a great way...

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Alphabet is putting its prototype robots to work cleaning up around Google’s offices

What does Google’s parent company Alphabet want with robots? Well, it would like them to clean up around the office, for a start.

The company announced today that its Everyday Robots Project — a team within its experimental X labs dedicated to creating “a general-purpose learning robot” — has moved some of its prototype machines out of the lab and into Google’s Bay Area campuses to carry out some light custodial tasks.

“We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices,” said Everyday Robot’s chief robot officer Hans Peter Brøndmo in a blog post. “The same robot that sorts trash can now be equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and use the same...

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How Cowboy Bebop’s jazz-infused sci-fi mirrors Afrofuturism

Image: Sunrise Entertainment

From the original anime to the new live-action series on Netflix

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Miami commission votes to banish electric scooters from its streets

Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images

The Miami City Commission has voted to end its multiyear experiment with shared electric scooters. In a four to five vote, the commission approved a “pocket item” (a last-minute legislative maneuver) to end the Miami scooter pilot. The ordinance went into effect at midnight November 18th.

Since 2018, Miami residents and tourists have been able to use mobile apps to rent dockless electric scooters. Companies have until 5PM on Friday, November 19th, to retrieve their scooters from the streets or the city will impound them.

“We’re shutting it down,” said Commissioner Alex Díaz de la Portilla, according to Mass Transit magazine. “That’s it.”

Scooters typically draw some controversy wherever they’re deployed, but the electric two-wheelers...

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Yubico key organizer keeps your house keys tidy and your YubiKey security key safe

The Yubico x Keyport Pivot 2.0 key organizer. | Image: Yubico

Yubico has teamed up with Keyport on a new key organizer that’s designed to safely stash your YubiKey security key (a small dongle that can act as an extra layer of security for your logins) alongside your house keys in one compact little enclosure.

It’s a neat idea. My house keys have to put up with a lot of abuse from being carried around in my pockets and stuffed in the bottom of backpacks. And while I’m not too worried about a set of metal keys surviving this kind of treatment, I wouldn’t say not to a little more protection for a USB dongle that I need to access my most secure accounts. YubiKeys are built like tanks, but nothing’s invincible.

The $25 Yubico x Keyport Pivot 2.0 key organizer appears to have been released earlier this...

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A finder’s fee won’t guarantee a PS5 from Amazon, Walmart, or Best Buy this holiday

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

It’s still difficult to find a PS5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch OLED, or practically any desktop graphics card made in the last three years. So difficult that many people resort to paying scalpers far more than it should cost to get one. This trend has stuck around since the early days of the pandemic, and it might not change any time soon.

This year, the likes of Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart signaled that they, too, would like to become console and GPU scalpers, in a sense. Each began hosting some restock events you couldn’t access unless you had a paid subscription to Amazon Prime, Walmart Plus, or Best Buy’s new “Totaltech.” But don’t fall for the notion that these services will go the extra mile for you. In fact, they don’t...

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Halo Infinite turned Craig into a rock star

One day you’re just another Brute on the Halo ring minding your own business, and the next you’re a rock star. That’s Craig, Halo Infinite’s infamous Brute that appeared in the notorious trailer last year. He might have originally represented the poor quality of graphics in the original _Halo Infinite_trailer, but now he has been memorialized as a rock star inside the game in an Easter egg.

The Craig shrine can be discovered on top of a giant tower in the fourth campaign mission in Halo Infinite. It includes a greatest hits album and a tour poster with dates for when Craig is holding a Zeta Halo tour. Songs include classics like “The Day You Become a Meme, I Got Tears Last Summer” and “I Smile Inside.”

Craig’s greatest...

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Otter.ai is limiting its free plan to 30-minute transcriptions starting December 1st

Otter.ai is adding new limitations to the free Otter Basic plan on the subscription service, which will limit free users to 30-minute transcriptions starting December 1st, down from the current 40-minute limit.

The company says that the changes are “due to increased costs and to maintain high standards of service.” Otter.ai is still offering the same 600 minutes of transcription per month to free users, however.

The overall monthly limit for free users isn’t changing, however

The change isn’t hugely problematic in the long run, given that Otter.ai still isn’t changing the total amount of transcription that free users can do — just the amount that you can have transcribed in a single recording. That means that attentive users can simple...

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Huawei MateBook 16 review: a nose(cam) short of great

It has an excellent screen, but some weird quirks

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FDA clears Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 boosters for all US adults

Photo by OLIVER BUNIC/AFP via Getty Images

The Food and Drug Administration opened booster shots for the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to all adults today, the companies announced, expanding eligibility outside of the initial, vulnerable groups they were cleared for earlierthis fall.

Although the COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States are still highly effective protection against severe cases of the disease, hospitalization, and death, protection against any infection or symptoms appears to be weakening. A third, booster shot of the vaccines could restore that protection: Pfizer showed in a clinical trial that the shot was around 95 percent effective compared with people who only had two doses, essentially restoring the same efficacy seen in the...

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Cowboy will send someone to wash your e-bike and fix flat tires, for a price

The regular Cowboy 4 (shown here) is also available in a step-through model. | Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge

Cowboy, one of Europe’s premier makers of electric commuter bikes, is now offering a mobile support service in 22 cities with more to follow; 14 in the EU and eight in the US where Cowboy only recently set up operations.

Cowboy Care costs €20 / £20 / $20 a month and covers cleaning the bike, tightening screws, replacing parts, and fixing flat tires wherever owners might be. It launches just in time for shipments of the much-anticipated Cowboy 4 and 4ST e-bikes. After some delays to the original September target, the newest Cowboys will begin deliveries next week to people who got their preorders in early, according to Adrien Roose, co-founder and CEO of Brussels-based Cowboy.

Image: Cowboy

An unlimited number of...

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The best early Black Friday deals on Google devices

The Pixel 5A leads the charge in a variety of early Black Friday deals from Google. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Google has launched its early Black Friday deals, and there’s a lot to like if you’re in the market for a Pixel, Chromecast, or Nest device. The search giant kicked off the deals in the Google Store, and now many of the big-name retailers are offering equivalent deals on the same items. Google even advertises these deals as running until December 1st, a few days after Cyber Monday.

By now there are many great early Black Friday deals to consider, and in addition to our retailer-specific roundups for sales at Target, Amazon, and Walmart, if you’re starved for ideas on what to shop for, we also have a variety of gift guides for you to check out.

In the meantime, we have highlighted all the worthwhile Google deals below — such as $50 off...

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Discord now lets you send up to 10 (accessible) memes at a time

Discord’s new alt text feature in action. | Image: Discord

Discord has updated its Windows and macOS desktop clients to let users add alt text for image attachments, the service has announced on Twitter. It’s a helpful accessibility feature for users that rely on screen readers and arrives alongside the ability to preview and upload up to 10 files at a time.

The alt text accessibility feature can be found by clicking the small pen icon (“Modify Attachment”) on the top right of each individual preview before sending it in a text channel. Of course, the feature relies on people making the effort to manually add alt text in order for it to be useful. But it’s better than not having the option at all.

big upgrades to attachments: now you can upload up to 10 files at a time on desktop, see...

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Microsoft’s new Xbox app for Windows finally solves game install headaches

Microsoft is now allowing testers to access a new Xbox app for Windows that greatly improves the game install process from the Windows store. As we reported earlier this month, the updated app allows PC gamers to install titles into any folder of their choice with unrestricted access to game files.

It’s an option that helps address many of the headaches of installing titles from Xbox Game Pass for PC, and it should also mean you can backup game files and restore them if need be. Previously, Microsoft forced games to install into a WindowsApps folder at the root of a drive, and it was locked down so you couldn’t modify files or freely move them around.

You now get options to manage where games are installed to.

The...

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Facebook is paying musicians and creators up to $50,000 to use its live audio features

Facebook launched its Live Audio Rooms feature (above) to rival once-buzzy app Clubhouse. | Image: Facebook

Social media conglomerate Meta continues its tactic of buying buzz, after CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised in July that the company would pay $1 billion to creators by the end of 2022. A report from The Information details how some of this money is being spent, with Meta-owned Facebook paying creators up to $50,000 to use the platform’s Live Audio Rooms feature — a rival to the once-buzzy live audio app Clubhouse.

When you make as much money as Meta does, buying success is a reasonable tactic, at least in the short term. The Meta-owned Instagram, for example, has been doing the same to boost its TikTok-rival Reels, paying creators up to $35,000 to post to the platform.

Meta promised to pay creators $1 billion by the end of 2022

According to...

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How Twitter got research right

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

It has not been a happy time for researchers at big tech companies. Hired to help executives understand platforms’ shortcomings, research teams inevitably reveal inconvenient truths. Companies hire teams to build “responsible AI” but bristle when their employees discover algorithmic bias. They boast about the quality of their internal research but disavow it when it makes its way to the press. At Google, this story played out in the forced departure of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru and the subsequent fallout for her team. At Facebook, it led to Frances Haugen and the Facebook Files.

For these reasons, it’s always of note when a tech platform takes one of those unflattering findings and publishes it for the world to see. At the end...

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Twitter stops opening links in AMP on iOS and Android

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter has quietly rolled back its support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on mobile, according to a support page spotted by SEO consultant Christian Oliveira. The support page originally detailed how Twitter would automatically send users of its mobile apps to the AMP version of a page from links posted on the social network. However, at some point since October 21st, Twitter updated the page with a notice saying it’s retiring the feature by the end of the year.

According to data from SearchEngineLand, this retirement process appears to have been completed earlier this month. Now, attempting to visit a page from Twitter appears to send users directly to the regular web page, rather than an AMP version that may be available.

...

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Halo Infinite’s Grappleshot helps make the familiar feel new

Halo Infinite is a familiar but different Halo

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Today, a jury got to hear Elizabeth Holmes’ lies for themselves

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In her own voice

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The NFT Bay asks if you would steal all the JPEGs

In what may be one of the better pieces of performance art this year, Australian Geoffrey Huntley has created a website that promises to let you torrent an entire blockchain’s worth of NFTs. It’s called, appropriately, The NFT Bay, and it’s an almost exact replica of the famous pirating site (with an added cheeky DMCA takedown link). As a site, it seems to do what it says on the tin, but as a statement it could spark an interesting discussion around what it means if you claim ownership over something on the internet.

Pretty much every link on the site (except for the one that’s a Rick Roll) will eventually lead you to the description page, which would look right at home on the real Pirate Bay (according to my friend, who is definitely...

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ConstitutionDAO loses $43 million auction of rare US Constitution copy

One of 13 remaining copies of the Official Edition of the Constitution. | Image: Sotheby’s

A quickly assembled group of crypto enthusiasts who crowdfunded an astonishing $47 million in funds to bid for a rare copy of the US Constitution lost out to a bidder with deeper pockets.

The group, ConstitutionDAO, said in an update on Discord that they did not win the auction at Sotheby’s tonight, which sold for a total of $43.2 million. The DAO’s organizers believed they would not have enough money to “insure, store, and transport the document” if they had made a higher bid.

The group assembled over the past week, mostly, it seems, because it seemed like a bunch of randos on the internet buying an important historical document would be a funny thing to do. Somehow, they managed to get enough interest to raise a huge sum in Ether. The...

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GeForce Now is about to start streaming PC games directly to LG’s TVs

A beta of GeForce Now is coming to some LG TVs running webOS. | Image: LG

LG first said in January that Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service was headed to some of its TVs, and now, it’s finally here — though as a beta. LG is rolling out the beta this week for “select 2021 LG 4K OLED, QNED Mini LED, and NanoCell TV models in 80 markets,” according to a press release.

GeForce Now lets you play PC games you own on other devices via the cloud, and this new webOS app will make it easier to use the service on a bigger screen. That said, games will be capped at 60fps and 1080p resolution — you won’t be able to play GeForce Now games in 4K via the webOS app. (That feature is currently exclusive to Nvidia’s Shield TV set-top box.)

Every GeForce Now tier is supported, Nvidia tells The Verge, including the new tier...

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MediaTek’s new Dimensity 9000 flagship could compete with Qualcomm’s top-tier Snapdragon chips

MediaTek has just announced its latest flagship processor: the Dimensity 9000, the company’s most powerful chip ever that looks like it should be able to go head to head with the best chips that more popular competitors like Qualcomm and Samsung offer.

Where previous top-tier Dimensity chips (like last year’s Dimensity 1000) were still less powerful than contemporaries like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 or Samsung’s Exynos 2100, the new Dimensity 9000 is coming out of the gate to make a case for 2022 Android flagships.

The new Dimensity 9000 is the first mobile chip to be built on TSMC’s 4nm process, in addition to using Arm’s new v9 architecture. It’s also the first announcement CPU to use Arm’s new core designs: a single...

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Several states are investigating how Instagram keeps kids on the platform

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A group of state attorneys generalhas announced an investigation into “the techniques utilized by Meta to increase the frequency and duration of engagement” of children and teens on Instagram and the negative effects that may cause (via The Wall Street Journal). The group, which includes officials from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Vermont, accuses the company of doing this despite reports that its own research showed its platform could have a negative effect on young people.

The research in question was exposed in a report from the Wall Street Journal, which said the company’s own documents show “Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls.” It was later discussed in a Senate hearing,...

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Exxon’s new Gulf of Mexico leases aren’t what they seem

An offshore oil well platform in the Gulf of Mexico off Grand Isle, Louisiana, U.S., on Wednesday, April 21, 2021.  | Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

ExxonMobil’s spending spree during yesterday’s lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico was significant, experts say, because the company might use the area for something other than oil and gas extraction. Experts outside the company speculate that ExxonMobil wants to use Gulf waters for a novel purpose: sequestering captured carbon dioxide.

The Biden administration auctioned off vast tracts of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas companies yesterday in one of the largest federal lease sales in recent years. The sale drew sharp criticism from environmental groups, which say that allowing new oil and gas development is incompatible with America meeting its climate goals. But it’s possible that Exxon — the biggest bidder in yesterday’s sale — isn’t...

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Ford and GM are getting into chip development to help deal with the shortage

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A year into the computer chip shortage that’s heavily affecting vehicle production, Ford announced a collaboration with chipmaker GlobalFoundries Inc., as The Wall Street Journal first reported.

Ford’s press release about the non-binding agreement is light on specifics but mentions plans “to advance semiconductor manufacturing and technology development within the United States.” Without committing to building any plants, the two companies say they will “explore expanded semiconductor manufacturing opportunities to support the automotive industry.” Speaking during an event later in the day, GM CEO Mark Reuss said his company is working to co-develop new chips with many semiconductor partners like Qualcomm, TSMC, and others.

Ford’s VP...

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Facebook tests giving more control of News Feed content to users again

Facebook is switching up the News Feed again | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook parent company Meta said it is testing new ways for users to customize the content they see in their News Feeds. The company said in a blog post Thursday that the test, available to a “small percentage” of users to start, would allow people to adjust their preferences to increase or reduce the amount of content they see from specific friends, family, groups, and pages they’re connected with on the platform.

Facebook has tweaked the way the News Feed presents content numerous times in the past several years and seems to keep rethinking what content should be prioritized and why. In 2015, it said it was changing News Feeds to favor content from close friends over that from brands and publishers. In 2016, Facebook said again it...

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Microsoft Xbox boss Phil Spencer tells staff he’s ‘deeply troubled’ by Activision Blizzard

Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Following a bombshell _Wall Street Journal_report that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick allegedly knew, withheld, and even participated in harassment and abusive behavior, the company’s big console partners Sony and Microsoft are semi-privately expressing their distress. Bloomberg is now reporting that Microsoft boss Phil Spencer has now told staff he was “disturbed and deeply troubled by the horrific events and actions” at Activision Blizzard and that Microsoft is “evaluating all aspects of our relationship with Activision Blizzard and making ongoing proactive adjustments” as a result.

Yesterday, Bloomberg also reported that Sony PlayStation boss Jim Ryan had told employees that the company had expressed “deep concern” with...

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