Mario Kart 8’s new DLC tracks are more (or less) of a good thing

Waluigi Pinball. | Image: Nintendo

Nintendo is now a third of the way through its ambitious DLC plans for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the ultra-popular kart racer that was released for the then-new Nintendo Switch over five years ago. Back in March, it announced it would be releasing a total of 48 new tracks for the game over the course of six “waves,” consisting of eight tracks each.

But the first wave, released back in March, felt a little basic compared to the highs of the base game, and often it was all too obvious which courses were based on content from handheld consoles or smartphone games. This wasn’t the case in the original Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, whose courses were so overhauled compared to their source material that you’d be hard pressed to tell the Game Boy Advance...

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Cameo’s CEO fell victim to the latest Bored Ape NFT heist

Image: Bored Ape Yacht Club

Non-fungible token, or NFT, thefts aren’t uncommon, but they continue to be a little mind-boggling— a bizarre combination of high risk and massive financial losses. The latest high-profile target is Steven Galanis, the CEO of celebrity video platform Cameo. Galanis reported over the weekend that he’d gotten his Apple ID hacked, and as a result, he lost a variety of NFTs. Most prominently, that included a Bored Ape Yacht Club ape that he bought for nearly $320,000 in January.

Galanis tweeted about the theft of Ape #9012 on Saturday, following a bot reporting the NFT being resold. Galanis originally purchased the ape for 100 Ethereum — around $319,500 at the time of purchase — and the alleged thief flipped it to a new owner for 77...

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The iPhone’s Focus mode (almost) kept me off my phone on vacation

Focus can help you tame notifications — but not much else yet. | Image: Apple

Two Fridays ago, just before I left for a week-long vacation to Florida, I went through my pretrip digital routine. I set my Slack status to “Vacationing” with a palm tree emoji and paused notifications until further notice. I turned on Gmail’s auto-responder. I deleted a bunch of apps from my phone that would only serve to distract me from poolside bliss.

The last thing I did was pick up my iPhone and create a new Focus mode. Focus, in case you didn’t know, is a new-ish iOS feature designed to let you quickly switch your phone from one context to another. You can set it to shut up your work apps on the weekends, turn off notifications while you’re reading or sleeping, or only alert you to new emails from 9AM to 5PM and not a moment...

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Intel launches Arc Pro GPUs that are designed for workstations and pro apps

Intel’s new Arc Pro GPUs. | Image: Intel

Intel is launching its Arc Pro series of GPUs today, designed primarily for powerful desktop workstations and laptops. The Intel Arc Pro A40 and A50 will both be available for workstations, while the A30M will be available in pro-focused laptops. All three GPUs are capable of hardware-based ray tracing and AV1 hardware acceleration — and are designed with AI tasks and creator apps like Adobe Premiere Pro in mind.

The Intel Arc Pro A40 will ship in a small single-slot form factor with 3.5 teraflops of graphical power, eight ray-tracing cores, and 6GB of GDDR6 memory. Intel is targeting this GPU at slimline workstations or small form factor PCs.

The larger A50 steps up to a dual-slot form factor, 4.8 teraflops of graphical power, eight...

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No electric vehicles on the market today qualify for the new EV tax credit

Congress is poised to approve newly expanded tax credits for electric vehicles, but the rules are written in such a way as to effectively disqualify every EV that’s currently on the market today.

That’s because most EVs run on lithium-ion batteries that are mostly made in China. The nation has a lock on some 76 percent of the battery market today (the US only represents 8 percent). And to get a deal passed in a deadlocked Senate, Democrats agreed to provisions that would require eligible vehicles to use batteries that are made in North America.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which passed the Senate this weekend in a party-line vote, would require batteries to have at least 40 percent of materials sourced from North America or a...

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Nvidia Q2 gaming revenue falls short of 2021’s mark by over a billion dollars

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Nvidia’s Q2 earnings won’t come out for another two weeks, but the company has dropped its preliminary numbers today and the results are not looking particularly good for its gaming business. Its gaming revenue is reported at $2.04 billion, a staggering 33.33 percent decrease from the previous year’s $3.06 billion.

The shortfall mirrors other gaming hardware companies, including Logitech, which reported a 12 percent drop compared to the same quarter last year, reflecting peak pandemic changes where consumers are done investing in all kinds of home equipment for work, play, and even exercise. And gaming sales as a whole have dropped 13 percent in Q2 to $12.35 billion compared to last year, according to market research firm NPD.

One...

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The best laptop you can buy in 2022

Image: William Joel/The Verge

The best laptops for you, from ultraportables to high-powered editing machines

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The Verge’s 2022 back-to-school gift guide

All the best backpacks, laptops, tablets, and wearables for the new school year. | The Verge

Our favorite laptops, bags, and gadgets for students

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US Treasury bans Tornado Cash mixer for role in crypto money laundering

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The US Department of the Treasury has added the Tornado Cash crypto mixer to a list of sanctioned organizations, barring all US citizens from interacting with it and requiring that US assets belonging to Tornado Cash be reported to the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The announcement was made on Monday morning by the Treasury in a press release that cited Tornado Cash’s role in laundering cryptocurrency stolen in major hacks, especially those linked to North Korean hacking groups. In March, $625 million was stolen from the blockchain behind the Axie Infinity crypto game and laundered through Tornado Cash — a heist that the FBI has attributed to the North Korea-based Lazarus Group.

The dramatic move from the Treasury is the latest...

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The M1 MacBook Air is discounted to its lowest price yet at Best Buy

The 256GB and 512GB models of the M1 MacBook Air are on sale. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Start your week off right with these handpicked deals, all part of this balanced breakfast. Our inaugural discount this week sees the M1-equipped MacBook Air discounted to $849.99 at Best Buy from its usual $999.99 price. This is the best discount we’ve seen yet on the 256GB model of the M1-equipped MacBook Air, making this an excellent chance to snag this lightweight Apple laptop. If you need a model with a little more storage space, you can also get the 512GB model for $1,049.99, a discount of $200 off the regular price.

It may not share the same level of performance with the newer M2-laden MacBooks, but the lightweight form factor and impressive battery life still make the M1 MacBook Air an excellent choice for a daily driver, e...

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99 percent of Netflix subscribers haven’t tried its games yet

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

As Netflix continues to build out its portfolio of games, the streamer’s seeing less than 1 percent of its subscribers interact with them on a daily basis. According to data obtained by CNBC from app tracking group Apptopia, Netflix’s games average 1.7 million users per day, a sliver of Netflix’s 221 million subscribers globally.

Apptopia found that Netflix’s games have been downloaded a total of 23.3 million times since Netflix announced a push into mobile gaming in November 2021. The streamer started with just five games, a collection that it has since expanded to over two dozen titles, including a game based on the Exploding Kittens card game, the League of Legends spinoff Hextech Mayhem, and the strategy title Into the Breach....

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Lucid unveils new ‘Stealth Look’ for its luxury electric Air sedan

Lucid Motors is leaning into the dark side with a new trim package called “Stealth Look.” The subdued styling option, which features a total of 35 new exterior design cues, will be available for the full range of Air electric vehicles starting this week.

The changes include mirror caps, glass roof trim, and frames around the headlights and taillights. A platinum finish has been swapped with something called “dark Stealth Polished finish.” Lucid said the goal is to imbue the Air, which is the only model the company has in production, with “a darker and overtly sporting personality.”

“A darker and overtly sporting personality”

Stealth Look will be available as an option for Air Grand Touring Performance, Air Grand Touring, and Air...

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Nissan Z review: the parts bin sport car

Calling the Z a parts bin car is not an insult but, rather, a necessary move for this car to exist in the first place.

Nissan reused a lot of parts when it put together this sports car — so why is it still so dang fun?

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How to run the Blackmagic Disk Speed test on your Mac

You can pull it up at any time.

Sometimes it’s not obvious, especially on a new computer, how well your storage is performing. Different models of the same product can even have vastly different storage speeds, as we’ve seen on the most recent MacBook Air models. If you’re running a Mac computer, and you’re curious how well the SSD is performing, there’s a very easy benchmark you can run called the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. Here’s how to run it.

How to run the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

It’s the first one on the right.

• Open the App Store.
• Search for Blackmagic and click the download buttonnext to the Disk Speed Test result.
• Once the program is downloaded, open it and click Speed Test Start.

The test will run continuously, and you’ll be able...

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Netflix’s Locke and Key ends with a whimper in final season

Darby Stanchfield, Jackson Robert Scott, Connor Jessup, and Emilia Jones in Locke and Key season 3. | Image: Netflix

When it debuted in 2020, Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Locke and Key got off to a pretty good start. Based on the brilliant comic series from Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez, the show tells the story of the Locke family and their sprawling ancestral home in Massachusetts that also happens to be home to some very cool magical keys. The first season of the show mixed the comic’s dark family drama and fantastical premise with some high-school hijinks ripped right out of Riverdale. But with season two, a lack of a great villain and a sped-up pace took away from what made the show so interesting — namely the magic and the mystery. Now, the series is back with a third and final season that attempts to wrap things up once and for all. But...

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Blaseball: birthing hope through chaos

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Meaningful triumphs in a broken world

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How to start experimenting with Google Lens

Illustration by Samar Haddad

This morning, I was idly looking through my Twitter feed and came across a thread discussing Starbucks’ recent hiring of a former Pinkerton intelligence analyst, which led to a discussion of the history of the Pinkertons as strikebreakers, which led to a 19th-century illustration of a crowd of women confronting uniformed men with guns. Curious as to the source of the illustration, I aimed my Pixel 6 phone at it and tapped on the Google Lens icon on the right side of my homepage’s Google search field.

After maybe a minute, I found a series of websites that had used the illustration, including one from Wikipedia that told me that the image was of an 1884 wood engraving made from a sketch by Joseph Becker illustrating “the striking miners’...

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How Animal Crossing helped me explore my gender

Jesse Belinsky / The Verge

It’s 2013, and tonight my friends and I are getting together to wish on falling stars during a meteor shower. Like many young teens meeting up with their pals, I want to show off my sense of style, so I spend a solid amount of time trying on different skirts, dresses, and accessories in order to find the cutest look. Luckily, I don’t have to worry about how comfortable the outfit will be or whether the fabric will chafe against my skin since the clothes aren’t going on my physical body but, rather, on my villager in the world of Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS.

In real life, I’m a tall, slightly chubby, pubescent boy with the acne and self-esteem to match. Even though I go to a fairly liberal high school and have been...

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Moving from Dubai to California, Spotify kept me in touch with my culture

Joi Mann / The Verge

In 2017, I moved 8,345 miles from my family — from my pink and green painted childhood bedroom in Dubai to a dorm room at USC. Overnight, my world changed. I went from my parents’ mollycoddled child to an adult that had to do their own laundry. The whiplash was heavy, and images of my old life kept echoing in my head. When I woke up to hear the birds outside my window, I half expected to hear my mom playing her Suprabhatam devotional music, loud enough to shake the floor. I’d remember late mornings in Dubai, listening to the radio after missing the school bus, sleepily ingesting the Bollywood Top 40 my parents had on in the car. After class, heading to cram school, I’d blast Mura Masa loud enough to crush my eardrums. On the way home,...

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Google sues Sonos over smart speaker and voice control tech

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Google is striking back at Sonos with a pair of lawsuits alleging that the wireless speaker company is infringing on a number of its patents around smart speakers and voice control technology. It’s the latest volley in a back-and-forth battle over wireless speakers that has so far involved multiple lawsuits from Sonos, one lawsuit from Google, and one ruling in favor of Sonos that’s led to features being stripped from Google’s products.

These new lawsuits allege infringement of seven additional patents. One lawsuit focuses on hotword detection and wireless charging, and the other revolves around how a group of speakers determines which one should respond to voice input.

Google says Sonos “started an aggressive and misleading campaign...

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AI systems can’t patent inventions, US federal circuit court confirms

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The US federal circuit court has confirmed that AI systems cannot patent inventions because they are not human beings.

The ruling is the latest failure in a series of quixotic legal battles by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to copyright and patent the output of various AI software tools he’s created.

In 2019, Thaler failed to copyright an image on behalf of an AI system he dubbed Creativity Machine, with that decision upheld on appeal by the US Copyright Office in 2022. In a parallel case, the US Patent Office ruled in 2020 that Thaler’s AI system DABUS could not be a legal inventor because it was not a “natural person,” with this decision then upheld by a judge in 2021. Now, the federal circuit court has, once more, confirmed this...

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Leaked video shows DJI’s rumored cinewhoop FPV drone in action

A leaked photo of the DJI Avata. | Image: @AttaccoG

A leaked video has given us another look at the DJI Avata, a rumored FPV (first-person view) drone from DJI that reports suggest will be designed to be flyable indoors thanks to a compact, so-called “cinewhoop” design. The Avata follows the release of the DJI FPV, the company’s debut first-person drone released last year.

The video, which was posted by reliable drone leaker @OsitaLV, appears to show the drone being piloted with DJI’s motion controller, which was previously available alongside its first FPV drone last year. The drone’s pilot is wearing a pair of FPV goggles unlike any that DJI currently has on the market, suggesting they’re the new model shown off in previous leaks. These DJI Goggles 2 look to have a similar design to its...

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LG‘s latest earbuds include head-tracking spatial audio

Image: LG

LG is today announcing two new sets of wireless earbuds. First up are the Tone Free T90 buds, which now become the company’s flagship pair. They still have the signature bacteria-killing UVnano charging case. And like the previous Tone Free FP9, the case can also double as a Bluetooth transmitter, letting you run an aux cable to devices that might lack wireless connectivity — like a treadmill — and still use the earbuds like normal.

According to LG’s press release, the noise-canceling T90s have “a new internal structure with larger drivers that helps generate deeper, more satisfying bass.” But what’s more interesting is that they support Dolby Head Tracking “across your favorite content and devices.” Here’s how LG describes that...

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II beta is coming in September

The beta for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is set to arrive next month, with PlayStation players getting access first, followed by those on Xbox and PC. Infinity Ward shared the news at its CDL Champs (Call of DutyLeague Championship) tournament. As with its previous betas, the dates are separated by console and whether you preordered the game or not.

The first early access beta kicks off on September 16th to 17th for PlayStation 4 and 5 players who preordered the game. This is followed by the open beta for all PlayStation players, which begins on September 18th and ends on the 20th.

The crossplay beta for players who preordered the game on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC will last from September 22nd to 23rd, while the open crossplay beta...

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Hackers might have figured out your secret Twitter accounts

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A security vulnerability on Twitter allowed a bad actor to find out the account names associated with certain email addresses and phone numbers (and yes, that could include your secret celebrity stan accounts), Twitter confirmed on Friday. Twitter initially patched the issue in January after receiving a report through its bug bounty program, but a hacker managed to exploit the flaw before Twitter even knew about it.

The vulnerability, which stemmed from an update the platform made to its code in June 2021, went unnoticed until earlier this year. This gave hackers several months to exploit the flaw, although Twitter said it “had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability” at the time of its discovery.

Last...

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Meta is shutting down one of its biggest VR games — but only for Quest 1 owners

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Around the same time Meta hiked up the price on its Quest 2 headsets, it also announced that it’s ending Quest 1 support for Population One, a popular battle-royale shooter set in virtual reality. BigBox VR, the Meta-owned developer behind the game, shared the update in a post on its blog, noting that Quest 1 owners will no longer be able to launch or play the game starting October 31st, 2022.

BigBox VR says the shutdown is necessary so it can focus on developing new experiences “that will push the boundaries of multiplayer VR.” The developers note that you can still play Population: One via Air Link — a feature that lets you wirelessly play games on your PC from your headset — but this means repurchasing the game on Steam if you...

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DeWalt gave my power tool battery the power of USB-C

A bridge between two charging worlds

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Samsung launches its Android 13-based One UI 5 beta on Galaxy S22 phones

New customization options in the One UI 5 beta. | Image: Samsung

Samsung has officially started to roll out its One UI 5 open beta to Galaxy S22 owners in the US, Germany, and South Korea. The update comes only a few weeks ahead of Android 13’s expected release, and just a few days before Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event. Like the operating system it’s powered by, the One UI 5 beta looks like a relatively small update that adds some customization options, tweaks to notifications, as well as new accessibility and security settings.

One UI 5 builds off of Android 13’s theming options by offering up to 16 preset color themes based on your wallpaper and 12 additional color options for your home screen, icons, and quick panels. It also introduces a way to stack similarly-sized widgets on top of one another...

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The first Thread motion sensor adds much-needed reliability to the smart home

The new Eve Motion Sensor is speedy and stable as long as you keep Bluetooth at bay

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Fitbit will soon no longer let you transfer music from your PC

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

If you’re the owner of a Fitbit Versa, Versa 2, or Ionic, you’ll soon no longer be able to transfer music from your computer to your Fitbit device. In a support page spotted by 9to5Google, Fitbit says it’s discontinuing its Fitbit Connect app, leaving you with only two ways to download music to your device: a paid subscription to either Pandora or Deezer.

Fitbit Connect is a companion app for Mac and Windows computers that lets you sync fitness data between devices and transfer music to legacy Fitbit devices. Fitbit has slowly been phasing out the software in favor of its mobile app, as it no longer recommends that users download it on its setup page.

But without access to Connect, there’s no way to download music to your Fitbit without...

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