The best deals on MacBooks right now

The 2020 MacBook Air, one of the best laptops you can get, is now available at Amazon starting at $949.

With multiple configurations and various models to choose from, finding a deal on an M1-equipped MacBook or Mac Mini is not all that difficult. It’s a slightly different story for the newer MacBook Pros with the beefier M1 Pro and M1 Max CPUs, but any bit of savings you can get on the new Pro models is sure to be worthwhile.

Here, we’ll run through the discounts that are currently available for the latest MacBooks, as well as any deals to be had on the Mac Mini. Of course, there are still some lingering discounts available for older, Intel-based configurations — which are compatible with macOS Monterey — but we strongly recommend opting for a newer model now that Apple has introduced its M1 chips across the MacBook Air and Pro lines....

Continue reading…

Ubisoft is done creating new content for Ghost Recon Breakpoint, even if you bought an NFT

The servers will stay up, but Ubisoft is no longer creating new content. | Image: Ubisoft

Ubisoft is no longer creating new content for Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the company announced Tuesday_._The game gained some notoriety for its heavily criticized Digits NFTs from Ubisoft’s Quartz platform, and the end of content creation means that there won’t be any new NFTs for the game, according to Ubisoft’s announcement tweet.

“The last four months marked the release of our final piece of content: the brand new Operation Motherland mode, tons of new items including 20th anniversary iconic outfits and Quartz items for Ghost Recon Breakpoint,” Ubisoft said. “We will continue to maintain our servers for both _Ghost Recon Wildlands_and_Ghost Recon Breakpoint_and we truly hope you will continue to enjoy the game and have fun playing in solo...

Continue reading…

My favorite thing about the Steam Deck is its ultra-portable case

Image: Valve

The best thing about the Steam Deck has nothing to do with its specs. Rather, its carrying case is my favorite non-feature feature that vastly improves the Deck’s esteem in ways its technical capabilities haven’t yet.

My first delightful surprise was the arrival of the case itself. I did not expect to get a carrying case when my Steam Deck arrived last week. For all that’s been said about the Deck’s technical performance — we wrote tworeviews — there hasn’t been much discussion of the case. I therefore thought, like with a Nintendo Switch or 3DS, that cases were available but sold separately.

The case is hard-shelled with a soft velvety interior and a molded form for the Deck to sit inside so it’s not bouncing around while zipped up...

Continue reading…

A new Orphan Black series is in the works at AMC

Sarah and Helena bonding over their physical similarities. | Image: Temple Street Productions

Though the original Orphan Black series seemingly brought the story of Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) and her sprawling family tree of sister clones to a close, AMC’s gearing up to return to their world with an all-new live-action series.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, AMC Networks has tapped _Fear The Walking Dead_supervising producer Anna Fishko to write and showrun Orphan Black: Echoes, a new series set in the near future of the original. The new show, which is set to be executive produced and directed by John Fawcett, will follow the lives of a new group of women who gradually begin to realize how deeply interconnected their origins are — despite the fact that none of them know one another. Given how the original _Orphan Black_came to a...

Continue reading…

Facebook won’t hold its F8 developer conference this year after pivoting to Meta

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Meta won’t be holding its F8 developer conference in 2022, the company announced Wednesday.

“Similar to years past, we are taking a brief break in programming and will not hold F8 in 2022 while we gear up on new initiatives that are all tailored towards the next chapter of the internet, and the next chapter of our company too: building the metaverse,” Meta’s Diego Duarte Moreira said in a blog post. “Similar to the early stages of the web, building the metaverse will be a collaborative effort at every stage — with other companies, creators and developers like you.”

Connect is still on for “later this year”

In lieu of F8, Moreira pointed to Meta’s “inaugural business messaging event,” dubbed Conversations, which will take place on May...

Continue reading…

This might be Jack Dorsey’s ‘rockey’ hardware crypto wallet

The wallet will have USB-C and a fingerprint reader. | Image: @JesseDorogusker on Twitter

We may have just seen the Bitcoin hardware wallet that Jack Dorsey’s Block (the company formerly known as Square) is working on, a device to help people “safely own and manage their Bitcoin,” according to the company. Block’s hardware lead, Jesse Dorogusker, tweeted an image showing several devices on Wednesday, all seemingly including fingerprint readers and USB-C charging ports — both things Block said its hardware wallet would include in a blog post last month.

Dorsey announced his company’s work on the crypto wallet in June 2021, and since then, we’ve gotten a few details on it. The company said the hardware wallet would be just one component in its crypto storage system and that it would have a corresponding mobile app for your...

Continue reading…

Google is adding a privacy settings walkthrough to Chrome

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is adding a new “step-by-step guided tour” of privacy and security settings in Chrome to sift through the many available controls, the company announced Wednesday. The new guide will include separate pages about some settings, each containing descriptions of what happens when a feature is turned on. There will also be notes on “things to consider,” such as the fact that turning history sync on means that the URLs you visit will be saved to your Google account.

You can check out the GIF below to get an idea of what the Privacy Guide will look like.

Privacy Guide will “begin gradually rolling out” to all Chrome desktop users on version 100 “in the coming weeks,” according to Google’s blog post about the news. To...

Continue reading…

Join us for a screening and panel discussion of Springboard at the Computer History Museum

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades attempted to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. In _Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone,_Dieter Bohn talks to the visionaries at Handspring and dives into their early successes and eventual failures.

Join us at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California, on Friday, May 6th, at 7PM PT for a screening of Springboard and a panel discussion featuring Dieter Bohn, former Handspring CEO Donna Dubinsky, and former Handspring president and COO Ed Colligan.

ATTENDING IN PERSON

Registration for the free event is open now....

Continue reading…

A second season of Severance is on the way

Severance stars Adam Scott as a worker drone who surgically divides his work and home personalities | Apple

Severance, the creepy Apple TV Plus drama about workers who find work-life balance by surgically altering their brains, has been renewed for a second season, the streamer announced Wednesday. The show starring Adam Scott as Mark S., a grieving widower who willingly forgets who he is for the entirety of his workday, has found an audience with its portrayal of the horrors of capitalism in a large but claustrophobic office.

Mark and his coworkers Helly R. (Britt Lower), Irving (John Turturro), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Burt (a spectacularly understated Christopher Walken) are trying to figure out what exactly they’re_really_ doing in the macrodata refinement department at Lumon Industries while avoiding trips to the dreaded Break Room....

Continue reading…

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ latest trailer is the stuff of nightmares

Elizabeth Holmes as Wanda Maximoff in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. | Marvel Studios

Though Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ earliest trailer strongly implied that a Stephen Strange variant is going to be the movie’s big bad, the Scarlet Witch’s presence in the story and the way that WandaVisioncame to a close has also implied that Wanda Maximoff may have something to do with the multiverse shattering into a million pieces. While Multiverse of Madness’ newest ad spot doesn’t explicitly spell out how reality comes undone around Earth’s magical heroes, it may explain why by confirming the return of two interesting characters.

Despite Wanda and Strange not having spent the most time on screen together up until this point, the new trailer establishes that the pair have quite a bit in common. For example, they...

Continue reading…

Glorious GMMK Pro review: easy mode for DIY keyboards

A sturdy DIY keyboard with a lot of potential

Continue reading…

More than 50 gig workers have been killed while working in the US since 2017

A new report highlights the dangers of driving for gig companies. | Staff Photo By Stuart Cahill/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald

Isabella Lewis was driving for Lyft on a Sunday in Plano, Texas, last August when she was carjacked and killed by her passenger. As her family tried to piece together what happened, they kept receiving calls from an insurance company they didn’t recognize, but finally realized it was Lyft’s insurer, who wanted to inspect Lewis’ car in order to determine whether it would pay to fix the damaged windshield and clean up her blood.

To date, however, her family says it has not had any communication from anyone with Lyft’s corporate office.

“The only thing we have heard from Lyft is when they said in the Dallas newspaper that their hearts were with us,” Lewis’ sister Allyssa said in an interview with The Verge. “I wish [Lyft] had handled the...

Continue reading…

The Witcher 3 is a whole new experience in first person

Delving into a game-changing mod for CD Projekt Red’s role-playing epic

Continue reading…

OpenAI’s DALL-E AI image generator can now edit pictures, too

DALL-E 2 results for “Teddy bears mixing sparkling chemicals as mad scientists, steampunk.” | OpenAI

Artificial intelligence research group OpenAI has created a new version of DALL-E, its text-to-image generation program. DALL-E 2 features a higher-resolution and lower-latency version of the original system, which produces pictures depicting descriptions written by users. It also includes new capabilities, like editing an existing image. As with previous OpenAI work, the tool isn’t being directly released to the public. But researchers can sign up online to preview the system, and OpenAI hopes to later make it available for use in third-party apps.

The original DALL-E, a portmanteau of the artist “Salvador Dalí” and the robot “WALL-E,” debuted in January of 2021. It was a limited but fascinating test of AI’s ability to visually...

Continue reading…

Alienware’s QD-OLED monitor sets a new standard for gaming displays

It’s the monitor that I’ve been waiting for

Continue reading…

How to use AirDrop on a Mac

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Ask anyone with a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and they’ll probably be able to attest that AirDrop is often a lifesaver. The ability to wirelessly and easily transfer files between Apple devices takes the friction out of sharing.

You don’t have to figure out how to email large files (like videos) you’re trying to send to someone — and there’s no need to upload anything to some cloud service.

With AirDrop, Apple creates a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection between the two devices in an AirDrop exchange. These devices communicate directly and aren’t required to be using the same internet connection.

To use AirDrop, you must:

• Be using a Mac introduced in 2012 or after that’s running macOS Yosemite or later.
• Have the two devices within 30 feet of...

Continue reading…

What Elon Musk could mean for Twitter

Photo by PATRICK PLEUL / POOL / AFP via Getty Images

Depends: What kind of activist investor does Musk want to be?

Continue reading…

The latest iPad Air with 256GB of storage is $70 off

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Discounts don’t usually arrive quickly for the latest Apple tech, but you can enjoy a steep price cut on Apple’s latest iPad Air, which has the M1 processor and a generous 256GB of storage. It normally costs $749 for that tablet configuration, but Walmart and Amazon are selling it for $679. It’s worth noting that this price cut is limited to the space gray colorway at both retailers.

In our recent review of the 2022 iPad Air, the features that make it worth buying include its fast performance, an excellent combo of speakers and display, and its all-day battery life. My colleague Dan Seifert actually recommends spending extra to get this very 256GB model, as the default 64GB just isn’t enough for how much this tablet costs.

If you’re...

Continue reading…

Biden group launches TikTok account to boost the president’s agenda

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Biden-affiliated nonprofit group Building Back Together plans to launch its own TikTok account on Wednesday as part of the group’s latest effort to engage young people with the president’s agenda ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

The group’s account, @buildingbacktogether, plans to create content inspired by TikTok trends and features, like the green screen function, to explain President Joe Biden’s agenda to the platform’s predominantly younger user base. The organization’s staff will frequently appear on the account, along with news clips and audio featuring the president.

“By launching a TikTok account, we’re building off that work with the goal of reaching the large and growing user base of this platform, including young...

Continue reading…

Twitter change leaves huge gaps in websites

An example of the blank box that’s now shown. | Screenshot: Twitter

Twitter has made a small but significant change to how deleted tweets are shown when they’re embedded in third-party websites. Since at least the end of March the social media network has started showing a blank box on external sites when an embedded tweet has been deleted. The change was detailed in a blog post from Kevin Marks.

It’s a big change from how Twitter used to handle deleted-yet-embedded tweets, when it would preserve the original unformatted text. With this recent change, that text is now gone, leaving a hole inside any story that embedded it.

Screenshot: Web Archive

How deleted embedded tweets used to display.

Screenshot: The Verge

How they display now.

According to T...

Continue reading…

Amazon Music’s prices are going up for Prime members

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon is increasing the price of its music streaming service, the company has announced in a new FAQ. From May 5th, Amazon Prime subscribers will have to pay $8.99 (£8.99) a month or $89 (£89) a year for access to Music Unlimited, up from $7.99 (£7.99) and $79 (£79) respectively. The price of the single-device plan — which lets you listen to the full library but only from a single Echo or Fire TV device — is also increasing from $3.99 (£3.99) to $4.99 (£4.99) a month. If you’re not a Prime member, the price of Amazon Music Unlimited is unchanged at $9.99 (£9.99).

As _Engadget_notes, the price change all but eliminates the discount that Amazon Prime subscribers get when paying for Amazon Music on top of their regular monthly subscription...

Continue reading…

Emoji reactions are coming to Google Docs

Emoji reactions appear as a third option when highlighting text. | Image: Google

Google Docs is getting support for emoji reactions, allowing you to respond to text with a simple symbol rather than a fully written comment. In an announcement post, the company says the feature supports all the emoji available in the latest release, which includes gender-neutral options and sillier symbols like melting face and biting lip.

A gif released by Google shows how the emoji reaction feature will appear as a third option alongside “Add Comment” and “Suggest Edits” when you highlight text. You can also type to search the emoji catalog. Google says these responses provide “a less formal alternative to comments.”

Image: Google

Emoji reactions in action.

Emoji reactions have become a staple of modern...

Continue reading…

Anker’s first 3D printer might be the one you’ve been waiting for

3D printing can be a time-consuming and expensive hobby — even if you try to do it on the cheap. It feels like I’ve adjusted, replaced, or upgraded half the parts on my Ender 3 Pro. It’s been fun, but never easy.

But what if a truly consumer-ready 3D printer changed that? We may be about to find out. Trusted phone charger company Anker is officially expanding beyond its Eufy smart home devices, Soundcore audio, Nebula projectors and Roav car accessories into 3D printing this year — and not in a small way. The just-revealed AnkerMake M5 looks like it could give leading brands a serious run for their money.

Image: Anker

Vases are a relatively fast thing to print on any FDM printer, but the M5 could make them even...

Continue reading…

Vevo to ‘review’ security after YouTube feeds for Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, and others were hacked

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

On Tuesday morning, YouTube channels for some of the world’s biggest stars showered fans with strange music videos. Vevo channels for artists like Lil Nas X, Eminem, Drake, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, The Weeknd, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, and many others were affected. The channels in question have subscriber counts that add up to hundreds of millions. Before the videos disappeared, viewers saw bizarre clips of Paco Sanz, a Spanish conman sentenced to two years in jail after being convicted of fraud for lying about having terminal cancer, and rapper Lil Tjay.

YouTube did not respond to requests for comment from _The Verge;_however, Vevo — which bills itself as “the world’s leading music video network” — did acknowledge...

Continue reading…

Plex’s latest beta features can help you navigate every streaming service you have

Image: Plex

Plex’s latest beta features are a modern solution to a modern problem — having to search through HBO Max, Netflix, Disney Plus, and like, three other services to find something to watch. The company announced a new “Discover” feature, which aggregates and recommends content from various streaming services and a universal watchlist that gathers everything you want to watch all in one place.

The Discover screen acts like most streaming services’ homepages, giving you recommendations on what to watch next, but with the ability to show content from many different catalogs. It shouldn’t overwhelm you with selections you don’t have access to, though. There’s a setting that lets you choose only the services you have. Plex has been working for...

Continue reading…

Block is contacting 8.2 million customers after a former employee downloaded company reports

Block’s logo. | Image: Block

Block, the parent company of products like Cash App and Tidal, said in an SEC filing that a former employee downloaded “certain reports” that “contained some US customer information” without permission from Cash App Investing (via Protocol).

Data in the reports, which Block said were downloaded on December 10th, included “full name and brokerage account number” and for “some customers” included “brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings and/or stock trading activity for one trading day.” The employee, who downloaded the data after they left the company, had access to the reports “as part of their past job responsibilities,” according to Block.

“The reports did notinclude usernames or passwords, Social Security numbers,...

Continue reading…

Elon Musk updates the paperwork on his shocking Twitter purchase to avoid extra SEC drama

Photo by Christian Marquardt - Pool/Getty Images

Within the news of Elon Musk taking a significant ownership stake in Twitter — and the revelation that it really is working on an edit button for tweets — many people noticed a wrinkle that seemed small at first but could cause problems later.

On Monday, Musk filed beneficial ownership report paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to note his ownership of 73,486,938 shares of Twitter (about 9.2 percent of its outstanding common stock and enough to make him the company’s largest individual shareholder), and the box checked on the form (pdf) indicated it was a Schedule 13G, which allows for a simple disclosure for investors who intend to remain “passive” in the company’s affairs.

We don’t usually get into stock...

Continue reading…

Microsoft’s pen-first notetaking app Journal graduates from a Garage project into a fully supported app

Image by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft has elevated its Garage project Journal, a notetaking app designed for styluses and pens, into a full-fledged product now called Microsoft Journal, the company announced Tuesday.

The app offers “a delightful freeform personal notetaking experience that lets you take notes and reason through ink,” Microsoft’s Renee Malone said in a blog post. The app lets you write and draw like many other notetaking apps, but it also supports gestures like scratching out words to erase them and circling words or phrases to select them. You can use the app to mark up PDFs, which is a popular thing to do, according to Malone; a pie chart in her post says that 59 percent of all page types in Journal were PDFs.

Image: Microsoft ...

Continue reading…

Netflix actually added a short-ass movie category

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Yes, Netflix actually added a “short-ass” movie category in response to Pete Davidson’s Saturday Night Live ode to movies shorter than an hour and 30 minutes. Netflix quote-tweeted the _SNL_rap on Twitter, casually saying “good idea” and linking to the new short-ass movie category on Netflix.

good idea https://t.co/PIIix3MZUKhttps://t.co/lyJmpuGBko

— Netflix Is A Joke (@NetflixIsAJoke) April 4, 2022

On the page, you’ll find a list of movies — organized by genre — that won’t have you stuck on the couch for hours, like Zoolander, Death at a Funeral, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Midnight in Paris, and a whole lot more. It, disappointingly, lacks some of the titles mentioned in the SNL skit, like _Driving Miss Daisy_and The Lion King...

Continue reading…

Twitter takes a harder line on POW photos and shadowbans Russian government accounts

Twitter says it doesn’t want to be used to violate the Geneva convention. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter announced on Tuesday that it will “require the removal of Tweets posted by government or state-affiliated media accounts” if they contain images or videos that show prisoners of war from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The company also said it would “drastically” reduce the chances of people seeing posts from Russian government accounts.

In its most recent updates to a post detailing how the company is responding to the conflict, Twitter says this decision is meant to ensure its platform isn’t used to spread content that violates the Geneva Conventions, one of which requires prisoners of war be protected from “acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.” This comes after the government of Ukraine h...

Continue reading…