I swapped out my Steam Deck’s noisy fan and am so happy I did

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

160 hours into Elden Ring, I’m sure of one thing: the single most annoying thing about my Steam Deck is its whiny fan. And now, I’m so happy to report there’s a way to fix it. It takes roughly 15 minutes and $30 — depending on where you live — to install a replacement fan from iFixit.

Five days ago, the repair company finally got a large shipment of those fans, and I bought one right away. Now, my Steam Deck’s tiny screech is gone.

Is the fan still loud? Yes, yes it is, but it’s a whoosh instead of a whine. I like to think of it as the sound of air escaping the Deck’s vents, but mostly, I don’t think about it at all. I can easily tune out the new whoosh, whereas the whine always managed to get my attention even after Valve tweaked its...

Continue reading…

Samsung says folding phone shipments reached nearly 10 million last year

Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge

Samsung is gearing up the hype machine for the release of its next foldables once again, and ahead of the next Unpacked event on August 10th, mobile president TM Roh has published another blog post making the case that the time for foldables is now — and that more people are picking up foldable phones.

“Three years ago, Galaxy foldables could be summed up in a single word: radical,” Roh wrote. “Very quickly, however, it became clear that this groundbreaking, flexible design fit perfectly into modern lifestyles. As a result, what was once a novelty three years ago is now the preferred choice for millions.”

Samsung says that nearly 10 million foldable smartphones shipped worldwide in 2021

In the post, Roh says that the industry shipped...

Continue reading…

Elon Musk now says Tesla could start Cybertruck deliveries in mid-2023

An upgrade from “hopefully next year.” | Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the company hopes to start delivering the Cybertruck, its battery-powered electric pickup, in the “middle of next year” during a call for investors. This is a more specific timeline than Musk has provided before — in last quarter’s earnings call, he said that the truck would be coming “hopefully next year.”

Tesla originally announced the truck in 2019, with a goal of starting production in late 2021. In August 2021, the company announced a delay until 2022, and Musk pushed that prediction further back until “hopefully” next year during the company’s Q4 earnings call in January. In the meantime, competitors like Ford and Rivian have launched their own electric pickups, with Ford saying that it plans to...

Continue reading…

Tesla sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tesla already reported vehicle shipment numbers for the second quarter, and now its full Q2 2022 financial report (pdf) reveals it’s dealing with inflation and the overall economic downturn, combined with a plunge in prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In the letter to investors, Tesla execs reveal the company has sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin holdings, adding $936 million in cash to its balance sheet.

Last year, Tesla made a $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin and announced that it would accept Bitcoin as payment. Tesla started accepting Bitcoin in late March, then abruptly reversed itself in May, just 49 days later.

In the latest report, Tesla says the value of its remaining “digital assets” is $218 million, which it had...

Continue reading…

John Fetterman and Dr. Oz trade memes in Twitter fight

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman campaigns ahead of primary election | Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

Over the last few weeks, the Fetterman and Oz campaigns have been locked in an online tit for tat as the midterm election cycle continues to heat up in Pennsylvania. The Oz campaign has repeatedly slammed “radical liberal” John Fetterman over Twitter for his 2016 Bernie Sanders endorsement and “crazier than you think” policy platform. But rather than distancing Fetterman from the criticism, his campaign has embraced the attacks as content inspiration.

The standoff burst into full view on Wednesday when Dr. Mehmet Oz posted a photoshopped image of Sanders and Fetterman styled as a 1980s department store glamour shot, taken from the film Step Brothers. The Fetterman campaign replied with an image reading, “graphic design is my passion,”...

Continue reading…

Wind farms could join oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 23: U.S. President Joe Biden points to a wind turbine size comparison chart during a meeting about the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The Biden administration is eyeing chunks of the Gulf of Mexico as new areas to expand its growing offshore wind ambitions. Today, President Joe Biden proposed opening up 700,000 acres off the coasts of Galveston, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana to future wind development. The administration is now looking for public input on developing those locations, after its proposal today to make them official “wind energy areas” where lease sales could be held in the future.

Building up an offshore wind energy industry in the US has been a big part of the Biden’s administration’s goals on climate change. There’s very little of it right now — just two small wind farms operating off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia. The first...

Continue reading…

TIL that WordPerfect is still around, getting updates, and is currently on sale

A screenshot of WordPerfect 2021. You read that right.

Recently my colleagues and I were discussing the history of word processors (that’s just the kind of thing we do here), and a few of them reminisced about using one called WordPerfect many, many years ago. Given that its heyday was in the eighties, I hadn’t heard much about it, so I Googled it for fun. And that’s when I discovered that it’s still being sold as a productivity suite. What’s more, it’s not one of those cases where a company is still taking money for what’s essentially abandonware — the most recent release is WordPerfect 2021. As in a year ago. And it’s on sale.

Corel, the company that’s been in charge of WordPerfect since before I was born, is running a (horrifically modern) Black Friday in July promotion, which ends at 9...

Continue reading…

How to clean up the iPhone apps you don’t use

It’s a good idea to check out which apps you have installed every once in a while. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

As we use our phones year after year or transfer everything over to a new device, many of us have accumulated a catalog of apps that we downloaded at one point but haven’t actually used in months (or possibly years). Whether it’s a failed social network, the companion app for the smart device you threw in the trash or just Duolingo shaming you for giving up on learning Spanish, all these apps can take up valuable space on our phone’s storage, clutter up our home screens, and, in worst case scenarios, even drain our batteries.

In this article, I’ll go over some quick and easy ways to get rid of apps you no longer use and to make apps that you don’t use very often a little more efficient.

Note: the screenshots in this article were taken...

Continue reading…

How the ‘Move Fast’ era of Facebook led to one of its biggest scandals

KIMIHIRO HOSHINO / AFP via Getty Images

Remember when Facebook’s News Feed was chock full of apps like Zynga’s FarmVille? This era in the early 2010s was Mark Zuckerberg’s first big attempt at making Facebook much bigger than just a social network and more like a platform for developers akin to Windows.

It was a formative period for the internet, when mobile phones and the app economy were just taking off. For Facebook, it was the “Move Fast and Break Things” era — an early motto of the company —when it grew to hundreds of millions of users and made decisions that still haunt it to this day. What did Zuckerberg get right in this period that set Facebook up for dominance, and what did he get wrong along the way?

That’s a tease of what you can expect in the second episode of the...

Continue reading…

The new Google Wallet is now available to all users

Google Wallet users in the US can download the app in the Google Play Store. | Image: Google

The new Google Wallet app is available to all customers shortly after people in 39 countries started seeing it available on their phones Monday.

Google Wallet’s official rollout is the latest step in the long history of Google’s payment app variations. The company combined Google Wallet and Android Pay in 2018 to create Google Pay, a single app that included tap-to-pay, tickets, and loyalty programs under one umbrella that worked across Android and Google Chrome. In 2020, Google Pay had a big app refresh to pull in peer-to-peer payments, deals, and other services.

Now Google announced Wallet’s comeback at its Google I/O event in May, splitting things up again to create a dedicated home for payment cards, airplane tickets, government...

Continue reading…

Google Calendar’s ‘known senders’ filter should help stamp out spam invites

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google Calendar’s new “known senders” option is supposed to make it easier to keep spam from clogging up your schedule. Toggling on the setting prevents invites from people you don’t know from automatically appearing in your Calendar. This way, Google Calendar will only automatically add invites from people in your contacts list, anyone you’ve interacted with through Workspace, and users in your company or organization.

If you’re familiar with Google Calendar, you’ll know that Google automatically adds events to your schedule based on the emailed invites you receive. Letting the floodgates open by allowing Google Calendar to add events received by “everyone” could mean having a calendar infested with fake and annoying events. While t...

Continue reading…

Now Google Photos has a shortcut to help you find your screenshots faster

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

An update for the Android Google Photos app (versions 5.97 and later) can help you go directly to a list of screenshots, according to Android Police. With the update, you’ll have faster access to screenshots by using a shortcut, accessible from the Photos icon on your phone’s homepage with a long press or available to split out as a direct shortcut placed on your screen.

If you don’t know how to use shortcuts on Android or have forgotten, here are Google’s instructions:

Touch and hold the app, then lift your finger. If the app has shortcuts, you’ll get a list.

Touch and hold the shortcut.

Slide the shortcut to where you want it. Lift your finger.

Tip: To use a shortcut without adding it to a Home screen, tap it.

I...

Continue reading…

The new trailer for HBO’s House of the Dragon has the blonds out in force

HBO Max

HBO finally dropped a newer and longer trailer for its _Game of Throne_s prequel, House of the Dragon, and you will not be shocked to learn the trailer is full of dragons and also plenty of Targaryens with their tell-tale white blond tresses.

The new show premieres on August 21st on HBO (streaming on HBO Max) and is a prequel set immediately before a civil war spun out of competing heirs in House Targaryen. In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels (and HBO’s Game of Thrones), this civil war spells the end of House Targaryen, which is weakened by the infighting and eventually nearly snuffed out just before Game of Thrones. The series is based on The Dying of the Dragons, a novella found in George R.R. Martin’s 2018 novel, Fire & Blood.

It...

Continue reading…

Apple releases new versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS

It’s light on features. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple’s latest slate of updates — iOS and iPadOS 15.6, macOS 12.5, watchOS 8.7, and tvOS 15.6 — are starting to show up for some users. Given the next versions of the OSes are likely due out in a few short months (and beta testers are already using them), it’s not a surprise that Wednesday’s updates are all relatively light on features. According to the release notes, here’s what’s new:

• iOS and iPad OS 15.6 adds the ability to pause, rewind, restart, and fast forward a live sports game in the TV app and fixes a few bugs in Settings, Mail, and Safari
• macOS 12.5 also gets the update to the TV app and a bug fix for Safari
• watchOS 8.7 “includes improvements, bug fixes, and important security updates”
• tvOS 15.6 “includes general...

Continue reading…

A million people on DALL-E’s waitlist will get access to the AI image generator

OpenAI

Those waiting for a chance to use DALL-E may soon get their turn. The powerful AI tool that generates images based on provided text will open in beta to one million users on the waitlist, OpenAI, the company that created DALL-E, announced today.

Users enter a phrase or string of words into DALL-E, and the tool returns its own interpretation in the form of four images, ranging from whimsical to hyperreal. An updated DALL-E 2, launched in April, added the ability to edit existing images.

A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art pic.twitter.com/vDbUpJoRWz

— Critter (@BecomingCritter) April 6, 2022

As of last month, the tool was only available to a few thousand as other users waited to be granted access. Many...

Continue reading…

Google reportedly pauses hiring for two weeks to ‘review our headcount needs’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google has reportedly internally announced a hiring freeze that will remain in place for two weeks. According to a report from The Information, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, sent out a company-wide email to inform workers about the decision. This follows Google’s announcement of a hiring slowdown that will last until the end of this year.

“We’ll use this time to review our headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized Staffing Requests for the next three months,” Raghavan writes. As noted by The Information, Google says that the hiring freeze won’t affect existing job offers, but the company will no longer extend any new ones to applicants.

In his message to employees earlier this month about the slowdown,...

Continue reading…

NASA sets tentative launch dates for debut of its massive new rocket

Photo by GREGG NEWTON / Gregg Newton / AFP via Getty Images

NASA is aiming to launch its new monster rocket, the Space Launch System, on its first trip to deep space as early as late August, the agency announced today. NASA says it has placeholder dates for August 29th, September 2nd, and September 5th for the rocket’s debut, though there is still plenty of work left to do on the vehicle between now and then.

The Space Launch System, or SLS, is a major component of NASA’s Artemis program, the agency’s initiative to send humans back to the Moon. Designed to carry NASA’s Orion crew capsule into deep space, the rocket is slated to perform a series of missions over the next few years that should eventually culminate with astronauts landing on the lunar surface again. But first, NASA wants to see it...

Continue reading…

YouTube hires Rene Ritchie, a tech YouTuber and former iMore leader, as its new creator liaison

Image: Rene Ritchie

Rene Ritchie, the former editor-in-chief of Apple-focused site iMore who has been a full-time YouTuber for the past two years, is joining YouTube as its new creator liaison, he announced on Wednesday. As creator liaison, Ritchie will serve within YouTube as an advocate for creators and work with creators to help them better understand YouTube, he said.

On YouTube, Ritchie has grown his own channel to more than 325,000 subscribers, and I count myself as one of them. The majority of his videos are deep dives on Apple-focused topics, and I learn a lot from his truly encyclopedic knowledge of the company.

3/ And, in the community, helping creators to better understand how YouTube works, educating, empowering, and most of all, listening....

Continue reading…

Romanian hacker faces US trial over virus-for-hire service

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Cybercrime may be a global industry — but that doesn’t mean criminals are immune from facing prosecution across borders.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced today that it had extradited dual Romanian / Latvian national Mihai Ionut Paunescu — known as “Virus” — to the US from Colombia for allegedly designing malware used to steal money from bank accounts across the world and operating the infrastructure used to distribute it.

Paunescu is alleged to be one of the creators of the Gozi Virus, a Trojan that infected millions of computers in countries including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Finland between 2007 to 2012. Distributed through corrupted PDF documents, the Gozi Virus captured banking login details and passwords from...

Continue reading…

EA’s last FIFA game goes all in on women’s soccer

Chelsea star Sam Kerr in FIFA 23_._

With the 2022 edition of the Euros currently underway in a sweltering England, interest in the women’s game is particularly high right now — and EA is taking advantage with the next FIFA release.

Today, the company unveiled the first trailer and gameplay details for FIFA 23, and, among other changes, the game includes the addition of women’s club teams from the top leagues in England and France. FIFA 23 will also feature both editions of the world cup: the 2022 men’s competition in Qatar and the women’s, which follows in 2023 in Australia and New Zealand. (Both will be added as part of a free, post-launch update.)

EA first introduced women’s international teams in the 2016 edition of FIFA, but the inclusion of club teams is still a big —...

Continue reading…

Faze Clan goes public in $725 million SPAC deal

Image: Faze Clan

Faze Clan, one of the biggest esports companies in the world, has officially gone public via a SPAC merger with B. Riley Principal 150 Merger Corp. The deal values Faze at $725 million, according to Axios, which is lower than the original $1 billion valuation from when the merger was announced in October. Faze is now trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol FAZE.

Faze is a huge esports and gaming lifestyle brand, and it’s extremely popular with younger audiences — Faze claims that about 80 percent of its audience is between the ages of 13 and 34. It not only has 11 competitive esports teams in games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fortnite, PUBG, and Valorant but is also associated with some big personalities,...

Continue reading…

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered will support DLSS and ultrawide monitors on PC

Image: Sony

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered from Insomniac Games is coming to PC on August 12th, and it’s going to come with a host of PC features like unlocked framerates, Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and ultrawide monitor support. Insomniac Games has been working with Nixxes Software to port the game to PC, and it has included a variety of customizations you’d expect to see in a typical PC game.

PC players of Spider-Man Remastered will be able to output at a variety of resolutions and use ultrawide 21:9 and 32:9 monitors. If you’ve got three monitors that make use of Nvidia’s Surround multi-monitor setup, then you’ll even be able to get Spider-Man swinging across all your monitors.

Image: Sony

PC specs list...

Continue reading…

Amazon says Matter really matters to its smart home ambitions

Amazon is counting on Matter to help fulfill its smart home ambitions. | Image: Amazon

Amazon wants every smart home device to work with its Alexa ecosystem, and it says Matter is key to achieving that goal. “We really believe in ambient intelligence — an environment where your devices are woven together by artificial intelligence so they can offer far more than any device could do on its own,” Marja Koopmans, director of Alexa smart home, told The Verge in an interview.

“Matter brings interoperability, and interoperability between all of those devices in the home is essential to realizing [our] vision of ambient intelligence.” The more devices can talk to each other, the more “experiences” platforms can build with them. For example, “If I leave home and I forget to turn off the lights or adjust my thermostat, Alexa will...

Continue reading…

Amazon is slowly turning Alexa into a totally automated virtual assistant

Alexa’s getting better at doing its thing without your input. | Image: Amazon

Amazon is making a bunch of changes to the Alexa user experience, all with the same idea in mind: making the virtual assistant easier to use. The most notable is a change in how Alexa handles Routines, which developers can now create and recommend to users instead of requiring you to manually build your own automations. Alexa’s also starting to coexist with other manufacturers’ assistants, and Amazon is working to make sure that the most important commands — like “Stop!” — work no matter what wake word you’re using.

Amazon made these announcements during its Alexa Live developer event, in which the company announced a slew of other new Alexa features mostly geared toward developers. They can add shopping to skills, more easily support M...

Continue reading…

Now DoorDash will double-check IDs when it’s delivering alcohol

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

DoorDash is changing its policies in a move that it says will crack down on underage alcohol orders. In addition to having users upload a photo of your ID to the app, DoorDash drivers will now have to scan your ID when they arrive at your home.

DoorDash has already been testing the two-part verification process in Dallas, Detroit, Miami, Phoenix, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and Northern Virginia, but now it’s rolling out to all customers. The service previously only required you to upload an image of your ID that Dashers were supposed to check when they arrived at your home.

Image: DoorDash

DoorDash first piloted alcohol deliveries in California in 2016 before expanding to 20 additional states last September. In 2020,...

Continue reading…

A first look at Discord on Xbox

Screenshot: Tom Warren / The Verge

It’s finally happening: Discord voice chats are coming to Xbox consoles. Starting today, Xbox Insiders can test this new integration, allowing you to connect to Discord calls from an Xbox One or Xbox Series S / X console. While this isn’t a Discord app for Xbox, you’ll be able to transfer calls from the mobile Discord and Xbox apps to your Xbox console and chat to your friends with your regular Xbox headset.

I’ve been testing the integration today, and it shows up in both Discord mobile and the Xbox dashboard. First, you’ll head into the Parties & chat section of the Xbox dashboard and scan a QR code on your phone. This will open up the Discord mobile app, and you’ll then link up your Xbox profile to your Discord profile. Once that’s...

Continue reading…

Vergecast: Nothing Phone 1 review, Congress takes on VPNs, and Project Genesis adventures

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Wednesdays, editor-at-large David Pierce leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives — and which ones you should bring into your home.

David starts today’s episode with Verge managing editor Alex Cranz and news writer Mitchell Clark to chat about what it took for Mitchell to get service from Dish’s new cellular network Project Genesis and why he was rewarded with NFTs to test the connectivity in Spokane, Washington.

Later in the show, David talks with senior policy reporter Makena Kelly about VPNs and why...

Continue reading…

Nanoleaf’s colorful smart lights and panels are up to 58 percent off

The Nanoleaf Lines modular smart lights give a futuristic vibe to your walls. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

After Nanoleaf’s recent announcement of the new, limited edition Ultra Black Triangles to celebrate its 10th anniversary, it’s also running celebratory deals that run until July 24th. The smart home lighting company is discounting various starter kits (cleverly dubbed “smarter kits”) and various wall panel light expansion packs, with some getting discounts as hefty as 58 percent off. There’s a lot to browse on Nanoleaf’s site, but we’re highlighting the ones we feel are the best.

The biggest price drop is on the Nanoleaf Shapes Mini Triangles, which are down to just $49.99 for a five-pack smarter kit at Amazon and Best Buy. These triangles may be tiny, but they’re easy to expand into much larger forms that are kind of cute.

For the...

Continue reading…

The Great Fiction of AI

On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule. The color-coded, 11-column spreadsheet she keeps open on a second monitor as she writes told her just how far behind: she had three days to write 9,278 words if she was to get the book edited, formatted, promoted, uploaded to Amazon’s Kindle platform, and in the hands of eager readers who expected a new novel every nine weeks.

Lepp became an author six years ago, after deciding she could no longer stomach having to spout “corporate doublespeak” to employees as companies downsized. She had spent the prior two decades working...

Continue reading…

Discord voice chat is coming to Xbox

Discord calls in the Xbox dashboard | Image: Discord

Discord and Microsoft are bringing Discord voice calls to the Xbox. The feature, available now to Xbox Insiders and coming soon to the rest of us, will allow users to connect to Discord voice chats from their Xbox, facilitating all kinds of cross-platform play shenanigans.

The process of connecting your Xbox and Discord accounts and starting up a voice chat is pretty involved. First, you have to download the Xbox mobile app, as you’ll use your phone to transfer Discord calls to an Xbox. Then, you have to connect your Xbox account to your Discord one. If you’ve connected them in the past, the instructions state that you’ll need to do so again to accept the new voice permissions.

Once that’s done, whenever you want to talk with your...

Continue reading…