EV prices are going in the wrong direction

Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

One of the major barriers to mass adoption of electric vehicles is cost. EVs are just way too expensive, with the average price hitting an all-time high earlier this summer of $66,000. That’s disappointing because the auto industry has always promised that prices would come down as EV battery packs became more efficient to manufacture.

But even more disappointing is the rate that EV prices are increasing as compared to their gas equivalents. According to a recent analysis by car shopping database iSeeCars, electric car prices saw a year-over-year increase of 54.3 percent while gas-powered cars were up just 10.1 percent.

The reason EV prices have shot up at such a staggering rate is multilayered. There’s a global chip shortage, which...

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Check out The Last of Us Part 1 remake’s launch trailer

As The Last of Us slowly becomes Naughty Dog’s Grand Theft Auto V or Skyrim, there’s now a trailer to go with the PlayStation 5 remake of the game.

The launch trailer of The Last of Us Part 1 retreads old ground covered by the 2013 and 2014 PlayStation hit with prettier, grittier graphics. We can now see individual bits of gray matter when Ellie brains a guy with an arrow, and blood splatters so detailed it’d make Dexter very, very happy.

The arrival of the launch trailer neatly coincides with the first glimpse of the HBO adaptation of The Last Of Us starring Pedro Pascal, who’s quickly making a name for himself as TV’s favorite found family dad who will wreck your shit. Starring opposite Pascal’s Joel is his Game of Thrones co-star B...

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Psychedelics help people with alcoholism drink less

Psilocybin is the compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

A combination of psychedelics and therapy appears to help people with alcoholism cut down on the number of days per month they drink heavily, according to a new study. Researchers used psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, to treat patients over eight months and saw a dramatic improvement in participants’ drinking habits.

Using psychedelics as treatments for alcoholism was a popular idea in the 1960s and 1970s, and studies on LSD found that it reduced alcohol misuse. But the approach went quiet in the decades after, according to an editorial published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry alongside the new study.

The new research marks a “rekindling of interest,” the authors of the editorial wrote. The study included...

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Devastating global droughts are revealing warships, dino footprints, and ancient megaliths

Nazi German warships scuttled in 1944 to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Soviets have emerged following droughts across Europe. | Image: Reuters

Drought conditions around the world are so extreme this summer that rivers are drying up, exposing previously inaccessible or undiscovered relics. This week, the treasuresinclude a bevy of Nazi ships, an entire lost island, and dinosaur tracks.

A fleet of over 20 wrecked Nazi warships laden with explosives has been exposed near Prahovo in eastern Serbia as water levels fall in the Danube, Europe’s second-longest river. The ships had remained undisturbed on the riverbed for almost 80 years and are believed to be among hundreds that formed a flotilla between Nazi Germany and the Black Sea Fleet in 1944. When escaping from the Red Army’s advancements became impossible, the entire fleet was intentionally sunk to prevent them from falling...

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Technology needs more buttons — and that’s why we love the Stream Deck

The Stream Deck doesn’t do anything new, but it does a lot of it better. | Photo by David Pierce / The Verge

I initially bought a Stream Deck for one purpose: to control the lights in my home office. There’s just one light switch in there, and that switch controls the light… and also every outlet in the room. Lights off, everything off. So that switch now has a piece of tape on it, and I bought a smart bulb and a Stream Deck so I could still control the lamp in the corner.

The Stream Deck isn’t a smart home controller device, at least not the way its creators at Elgato originally conceived it. (It’s also not a Steam Deck, the game console from Valve.) They built and marketed the $150 device toward streamers (hence the name) who need to be constantly switching scenes and camera inputs, moderating a fast-moving chat, and grabbing clips to use for...

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This smart mood ring is supposed to monitor mental health — without changing colors

The Happy Ring wants to differentiate itself as a “mood” ring to help track your mental health. | Image: Happy Health

Startup Happy Health is looking to give the mood ring a “smart” makeover. Instead of dubious color-changing stones, it has created the Happy Ring, which aims to alert users about their mental health using biometric sensors and artificial intelligence.

The Happy Ring, which just received $60 million in funding, features a custom electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor that monitors changing stress levels in real time. Essentially, the device works by detecting when your sympathetic nervous system — the thing that regulates your fight or flight response — starts raring up.

“As we start to have difficult thoughts or experience strong emotion, our brain responds to help us respond to that stimuli,” says Dustin Freckleton, a medical doctor and...

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Find the best AI-powered app to transcribe your audio

Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Whenever a popular online app announces a change to its fees, or in the services it provides for those fees, you’re going to get a reaction from its subscribers — especially the long-term ones. The latest app to cause this type of dismay is Otter, a recording and transcription service that recently announced downgrades of the services it provides on two of its plans and raised the price on a monthly plan.

For free users, it means that they will no longer have access to all their past transcriptions — only the last 25. For paying customers who are on Otter’s Pro plan, the change will be nearly as (or more) drastic: they will be downgraded from a monthly allowance of 6,000 minutes of transcribed audio to 1,200 minutes and from a maximum of...

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Fitbit’s Sense 2 amps up stress tracking

Can’t tell the Versa 4 or Sense 2 apart? Squint, and you might see the Sense 2’s sensor on the edges of the display. | Image: Fitbit

After several leaks and a not-so-subtle teaser yesterday, Fitbit officially announced what we all knew was coming: the Sense 2, the Versa 4, and the Inspire 3. And while Fitbit is introducing new software alongside the new hardware, this update is more about incremental improvements and refining what you already know rather than launching anything revolutionary. Oh, and yes, the Sense 2 and Versa 4 have physical buttons!

The $299.95 Sense 2 and $229.95 Versa 4 both have minor design tweaks. For starters, both are thinner and lighter. The button on both devices also sits higher up, as does the area where you attach straps. Meanwhile, the Sense 2 incorporates its health sensors into the device’s display using “vaporized electrodes.” That...

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Splatoon 3 puts online play, fashion, and hair front and center

Image: Nintendo

Despite feeling uncannily similar to play as past installments, Splatoon 3 is packed with smart changes and updates that will likely lead to people — or at least, me — keeping the game in rotation for much longer than before. I got to play over an hour of the game’s various modes ahead of its September 9th launch, including just a few levels of the main story, a few rounds of Salmon Run (the game’s surprisingly difficult but rewarding horde mode), and Turf War (Splatoon’s take on a four-versus-four deathmatch).

You’ll notice a welcome quality-of-life change right when you boot it up. Instead of being forced to sit through an intro presentation of the latest announcements for in-game activities each time you restart the game, as past S...

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Nintendo says Splatoon 3’s Shiver isn’t nonbinary

Image: Nintendo

Following the mid-August Nintendo Direct that showed off what to expect with Splatoon 3, fans of the game speculated that Shiver, one of the faces in the new game, might identify as nonbinary. So we asked Nate Bihldorff, Nintendo’s SVP of development and publishing, who confirmed to The Verge that Shiver identifies as female. And that while Shiver’s she/her pronouns weren’t mentioned in the Direct, they are used in the game.

Viewers hoping that Shiver would be a nonbinary character had some convincing clues to go off from the video showcase linked above. As The Gamer notes, the Deep Cut hype group that Shiver belongs to rocks a lot of purple, yellow, black, and white — the colors of the nonbinary flag. The publication also speculated...

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Windows 8’s missing startup sound has been hiding in plain sight

Windows 8 was released nearly 10 years ago.

A former Microsoft employee has revealed what the missing Windows 8 startup sound was supposed to be. Microsoft has used unique startup sounds in Windows versions for decades, but Windows 8 ended that tradition with a silent bootup process. While startup sounds eventually returned for Windows 11, the missing Windows 8 sound has been hiding in Windows 10 and Windows 11 for years now.

Jensen Harris, the former director of program management for the Windows user experience team at Microsoft, was behind the original startup sound removal in Windows 8. In a new YouTube video, Harris reveals what the missing Windows 8 sound is. (See video below.) It’s actually the same as the startup sound in Windows 10 and Windows 11, which isn’t enabled by...

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What to expect from Apple’s iPhone 14 event

Nick Barclay / The Verge

Gadgets galore

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Dennis from It’s Always Sunny is starring in a film about the rise and fall of BlackBerry

Photo by: Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Well, we didn’t know this one was coming: they’re making a film about former-mobile-titan BlackBerry, and it’s going to star Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as the company’s co-CEO, Jim Balsillie. According to The Globe and Mail, production wrapped this week, though when exactly the film will hit cinemas is unknown.

The film, simply titled BlackBerry, is based on the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, by journalists Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish. According to its blurb, the book focuses on “an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an abrasive Harvard Business school grad, Jim Balsillie” — the two founders of Research in Motion (RIM), which...

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Samsung’s new gaming monitors include easy access to Xbox Cloud Gaming, Stadia, and more

Image: Samsung

Samsung is introducing four new gaming monitors at Gamescom today, and they’re the first Odyssey models to have Samsung’s Gaming Hub built in. This gaming hub provides quick and easy access to Xbox Cloud Gaming, Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, and Nvidia GeForce Now game streaming services.

The Samsung Odyssey G70B and G65B are both designed primarily for PC gaming, with the G70B available in both 27- and 32-inch flat IPS options with 4K support at 144Hz and 1ms gray-to-gray (GtG) response times. The G65B is a curved monitor (1000R) with the same 1ms GtG response times, and it’s available in 27- and 32-inch sizes with 1440p support at 240Hz. Samsung doesn’t mention whether the G65B is IPS, VA, or TN, but given its history with curved panels...

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Plex breach exposes usernames, emails, and encrypted passwords

Plex informs customers of a security breach that may have compromised account information. | Image: Plex

Streaming media platform Plex sent out an email to its customers earlier today notifying them of a security breach that may have compromised account information, including usernames, email addresses and passwords. Although there is no sign that the encrypted passwords were exposed, Plex nevertheless is advising all users to change their passwords immediately.

Plex is one of the largest media server apps available, used by around 20 million people to stream video, audio and photos they upload themselves, in addition to an increasing variety of content the service provides to paid subscribers.

“A third-party was able to access a limited subset of data that includes emails, usernames, and encrypted passwords”

The email states, “Yesterday,...

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Facebook is broken and spamming celebrity comments everywhere

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook is currently experiencing a bizarre bug that’s filling user feeds with endless posts from celebrity accounts. Multiple Verge staffers who attempted to use the social media network this morning experienced the same issue, where their main News Feed is flooded with minor posts sent to pages for artists like Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles.

Users have been quick to take advantage of the bug and are now sending memes to celebrities that they know will be shared far and wide. One widely shared image I’m seeing on my own feed features a picture of a turkey sandwich with the caption, “If you see this share it to another celebrities Facebook page keep the turkey sandwich moving.” It seems everyone that follows that celebrity will...

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Acer’s Vero 514 brings its ‘eco-conscious’ concept to a Chromebook

So green. | Image: Acer

Acer is adding a Chromebook to its Vero lineup, which it says is meant to offer laptop buyers an “eco-conscious” option. Like the (rather disappointing) Windows laptop that came before it, the Chromebook Vero 514 is made using recycled plastics, has a chassis that’s 99 percent recyclable, and comes in packaging that’s 90 percent recycled paper, according to the company. Acer’s press release even suggests that part of the Chromebook’s packaging can be “transformed into a multi-purpose triangular laptop stand,” if you’re loathe to throw anything away.

Before we go over the recyclability, though, let’s quickly go through the specs — it weighs in at just a hair over 3 pounds, which is reasonable for a laptop with a 14-inch screen, and is...

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The best (and worst) of Opening Night Live

Deep Silver / Dambuster Games

To kick off Gamescom this week, Geoff Keighley hosted his Opening Night Live event, a two hour-long gauntlet featuring announcements and trailers of video games, including many that aren’t made in the US. Here’s a not-at-all-exhaustive list of some of the most interesting games — if you want that, check out the full video here. We also covered some of the biggest news from the show in other articles, including Hideo Kojima’s new Spotify podcast, the release date of Return to Monkey Island, Sony’s new Edge controller, and even a Pokémon concept car.

Everywhere

Everywhere — a game that’s either going to have awesome or terrible search engine optimization — kicked off the program. In the featurette, the developers at Build a Rocket Boy,...

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Elon Musk vs. Twitter: all the news about one of the biggest, messiest tech deals ever

Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Stay up to date with the latest in the Musk-Twitter saga

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George Lopez is the latest comedian to sue Pandora for copyright infringement

Photo by Roy Rochlin / Getty Images

The lawsuits are piling up for Pandora, which has been accused by comedians, including Lewis Black and Andrew Dice Clay, of streaming their works without the proper license. Now, George Lopez is joining the fray, seeking $5.5 million from the streamer.

Lopez filed suit on Tuesday, claiming that Pandora streamed two of his comedy albums, Right Now Right Now and Team Leader, without paying him royalties or obtaining the proper licenses from him. “[Pandora] decided it would infringe now to ensure it had this very valuable intellectual property on its platform to remain competitive, and deal with the consequences later,” the filing said. “Later is now.” A representative for Pandora’s parent company, SiriusXM, did not immediately respond to...

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The best Nintendo Switch cases you can buy

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

The best ways to carry around a Switch in style

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Elon Musk and the $44 billion Twitter buyout he’s trying to terminate

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Now Elon wants out of the deal?

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Here’s how much Apple charges for every part to fix your own MacBook

Image: Apple

Yesterday, Apple revealed it would expand its Self Service Repair program to let you fix your own MacBooks, and today the program is here. You can now download full repair manuals for your 2021 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros and the 2020 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro and M1 MacBook Air — and shop for parts you might need.

But what will Apple actually let you buy, and how much will you really have to pay? That’s not obvious until you enter your serial numbers and root around the company’s entire store — so we did it for you.

Many prices seem (relatively) generous! Others, not so much. You can’t just replace your own battery or keyboard on a MacBook Pro, for example! You have to buy the entire top lid that comes with that and other parts...

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Dead Island 2 will let you taunt zombies with your voice, thanks to Amazon’s Alexa

A zombie in Dead Island 2 | Image: Deep Silver

Amazon is launching a new tool called Alexa Game Control that’s designed to let gamers use natural language voice commands so they can accomplish actions in video games. The first game to feature the technology will be the zombie-filled Dead Island 2, which was just re-revealed at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live event.

With Alexa Game Control, Amazon says you’ll be able to do things like interact with NPCs and switch weapons just by using your voice. You won’t need to use a wake word like “Alexa” or even have one of Amazon’s Echo devices, and the company says that the feature will work with “any microphone or headset connected to their PC or console.” However, you will be able to use Alexa features like controlling smart home devices and...

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How to back up your Google account

Samar Haddad / The Verge

Bad stuff happens — and occasionally, it happens to your Google account. One nightmare for those who depend on their Gmail, Google Photos, and other Google apps is to lose access to all that data. This is what happened to a father who sent photos of his child to a doctor using his Android phone and found himself suddenly without access to the years of personal data — contacts, family photos, you name it — that were in his Google accounts.

There are other good reasons to have a local backup of your Google info. You may be switching jobs, or maybe you’ve decided to stop using a specific email account, or you just want a copy of all your emails just in case. Whatever your reasons, it’s not a bad idea to back up and export your Gmail and...

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Mini made a Pokémon concept car that you can hook up a game console to

Mini meets Pokémon in this unusual mashup. | Image: Mini / Pokemon

Mini teamed up with Pokémon to develop a Pikachu-themed concept car that’s, fittingly, all-electric. The automaker showcased the car during the Gamescom Opening Night Live event, which lets you hook up your game console and project your gameplay from the front of the vehicle.

Mini used its Aceman concept for this collaboration, which it previously revealed in July. With the “Pokémon mode” that comes installed on this particular car, Pikachu takes over the vehicle’s main display when the vehicle’s turned on, while digital lightning bolts travel across the entire dashboard.

But the coolest part about this concept is that you can actually plug in your game console and then use the vehicle’s exterior projector to display your gameplay on...

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Mini made a Pokémon concept car that you can hook up a game console to

Mini meets Pokémon in this unusual mashup. | Image: Mini / Pokemon

Mini teamed up with Pokémon to develop a Pikachu-themed concept car that’s, fittingly, all-electric. The automaker showcased the car during the Gamescon Opening Night Live event, which lets you hook up your game console and project your gameplay from the front of the vehicle.

Mini used its Aceman concept for this collaboration, which it previously revealed in July. With the “Pokémon mode” that comes installed on this particular car, Pikachu takes over the vehicle’s main display when the vehicle’s turned on, while digital lightning bolts travel across the entire dashboard.

But the coolest part about this concept is that you can actually plug in your game console and then use the vehicle’s exterior projector to display your gameplay on...

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Hideo Kojima’s new Spotify podcast launches in September

Image: Spotify

Have you ever wanted to know how in the hell a man like Hideo Kojima comes up with some of the outlandish stuff you see in his games? Well, you’re about to, as he’s coming soon to earholes near you.

During Opening Night Live, otherwise known as Geoff Keighley’s European Adventure, the maestro of video game marketing announced that his friend, Hideo Kojima, would be making an appearance. And whenever Kojima deigns to show his face, the gaming world pauses with bated breath, waiting to see what bonkers-ass game that man has cooked up now. But unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on where in the Kojima fandom you fall), his newest announcement isn’t a new game or even a port of an old game but a podcast.

Brain Structure, Kojima’s new...

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Gotham Knights is coming out a bit sooner than expected

Harley Quinn in Gotham Knights_._ | Image: WB Games

Gotham Knights, an open-world RPG set in the Batman universe, will be available just a little bit sooner than we originally knew. The game was set to be released on October 25th, but now it’s coming out on October 21st, according to a trailer that debuted at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live show.

In Gotham Knights, you’ll play as Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin, and Red Hood to protect Gotham City from many famous Batman villains. The trailer’s description mentions Mr. Freeze, Harley Quinn, Clayface, and the Court of Owls, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you run into more in the course of the game. The game is playable solo or with one other person.

Gotham Knights, from Warner Bros. Games Montreal, was originally set to be released in 2021 but...

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Sorry, Elon, but Jack Dorsey is still Twitter’s main character

Laura Normand / The Verge

Listen, I’m sure there will be a lot of sturm und drang about what the whistleblower disclosures mean for Elon Musk’s Twitter deal, but I want to focus on something dumber and pettier: Jack Dorsey.

Twitter had serious vulnerabilities that Russian and Chinese governments might try to take advantage of, according to the whistleblower complaint from Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the former Twitter security chief. (Zatko refers to himself as “Mudge” in the complaint, but I will be calling him Zatko because that’s his government name.) Zatko also alleges that Twitter had no incentive to count bots correctly. I can’t help but notice, though, that all of these allegations suggest that Dorsey was an incompetent leader.

The first time Dorsey was CEO, he...

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