How Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Parag Agrawal cratered the Twitter deal, in texts

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk’s deposition for the Twitter v. Musk suit may have been rescheduled for next week, but the public got some more inside dirt about his plans for Twitter, thanks to the release of two slideshow presentations and a slew of Musk texts.

The texts show Musk and a variety of contacts — including former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, and podcaster Joe Rogan — talking about everything from the blockchain to putting Oprah on Twitter’s board. (That part might be a joke, but with Musk, it’s difficult to tell.) But above all, they’re a chronicle of the deal’s slow implosion.

Twitter “never should have been a company.”

The texts are light reading, and you can check them out here if you’re so inclined. They’re mostly...

Continue reading…

Anker’s Soundcore Liberty 4 earbuds add spatial audio and heart rate tracking

Soundcore Liberty 4 earbuds | Image: Soundcore

Today Anker is adding a new entry to its line of Soundcore earbuds with the Liberty 4. While this set keeps the brand in the budget earbud category with a $149.99 price, they’re the first ones in this line to combine a “stick” design (as seen in the Liberty Air 2 Pro) and dual dynamic drivers that Soundcore claims “push the boundaries of sound performance, offering clarity across all frequencies for the best listening experience with all genres of music.”

The Liberty Air 2 Pro made our list of the best cheap earbuds last year, and the Liberty 3 Pro managed to impress for the price when we reviewed them in February, despite ANC that could use some improvement and some extra emphasis on bass and treble under their default settings.

While...

Continue reading…

Eufy’s impressive new smart cameras use AI to identify you and your pets

Image: Eufy

Smart home company Eufy’s new wireless security camera, the EufyCam 3, bumps up the resolution to 4K and adds a built-in solar panel to extend the year-long battery life even further. But its best features come from the new HomeBase 3 hub the camera connects to wirelessly. This adds local processing of video to send you an alert when it spots a person, pet, or vehicle, plus facial recognition so it can tell you if it’s a stranger or a family member.

Another interesting feature is the option to upgrade the storage to as much as 16 TB of local storage with a hard drive slot. Eufy says this is enough for 60 years of motion-activated video footage, and it adds the capability to record continuous video — a first for the Eufy ecosystem.

The...

Continue reading…

NASA is studying whether SpaceX can visit the Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope | Image: NASA

SpaceX and NASA have agreed to figure out whether or not a SpaceX ship could visit and potentially breathe new life into the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. They announced that they were partnering on a study that would look into whether or not that kind of mission was even possible.

The study will take about six months to complete and will involve NASA and SpaceX. It also involves the Polaris Program, a private human spaceflight effort funded by billionaire Jason Isaacman. Earlier this year, Isaacman bought three flights to space on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, a series of missions he’s calling Polaris.

It is not clear yet whether or not a trip to the Hubble would even require a crew

It is not clear yet whether or not a trip to the Hubble...

Continue reading…

Google Stadia never mattered, and it never had a chance

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Google had big plans for its cloud gaming service, but it never tipped the scales. Soon, Google will be shutting it down.

Continue reading…

Intel’s RTX 3060 competitor is priced at just $289

Intel’s Arc A750 arrives next month. | Image: Intel

Intel surprised PC gamers earlier this week with $329 pricing for its top Arc A770 GPU, matching Nvidia’s RTX 3060 retail pricing. While it’s still difficult to find an RTX 3060 at $329, Intel is now undercutting Nvidia’s popular GPU with a $289 starting price for its A750, a card it claims should be able to trade blows with the RTX 3060.

We’re still waiting on independent reviews of the Arc A750, but Intel did release 48 benchmarks last month showing that it should be able to beat or come close to Nvidia’s RTX 3060 performance in modern games. Intel tested its A750 directly against the RTX 3060 across 42 DirectX 12 titles and six Vulkan games, and the results look promising.

Intel is clearly aiming for performance per dollar and budget...

Continue reading…

Soon you can buy a Peloton at Dick’s

Peloton continues to expand outside of its own marketplace. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In August, Peloton partnered with Amazon to sell its bikes and other accessories and apparel via the retailer’s website and apps. Today, Peloton announced another partnership with Dick’s Sporting Goods to sell its equipment both online and exclusively in its stores across the US. The partnership marks the first time that its equipment will be readily available for purchase in a third-party retailer’s brick-and-mortar store.

The move to expand its fitness lineup to physical stores beyond the ones Peloton operates isn’t surprising. It’s continuing a plan to improve operations after a disastrous last 18 months that included layoffs, replacing founder and CEO John Foley with a new CEO, and restructuring. Last month, CEO Barry McCarthy...

Continue reading…

Apple fires exec after he made crude jokes on the expensive car guy’s TikTok

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Apple’s vice president of procurement, Tony Blevins, has been fired from the company after his crude remarks in a TikTok interview went viral, according to a report from Bloomberg. Earlier this month, creator Daniel Mac posted a video where he asked Blevins what he does for a living, which showed Blevins responding: “I race cars and play golf and fondle big-breasted women. But I take weekends and major holidays off.”

The video doesn’t identify Blevins by name and doesn’t reference his position at Apple, though Blevins does note that his job offers “a hell of a dental plan.” Mac’s format on TikTok mostly consists of walking up to people in expensive or luxurious cars and asking what they do for a living. As a slightly more safe for work...

Continue reading…

Gaming tech can be used to walk through buildings before they’re even constructed

Image: Epic Games

Epic Games is partnering with industry design software giant Autodesk to bring game-like graphics to architecture tools in order to visualize design concepts and plans as more immersive environments.

While Autodesk architecture software such as Revit is capable of creating 3D design plans, the partnership will introduce easy-to-use tools to designers, with features typically seen more often in game development, such as Unreal Engine, ray tracing, and a huge library of 3D assets to populate environments.

Anyone subscribed to Autodesk Revit (a building information modeling solution for architects) will now get free access to Epic Game’s Twinmotion, an Unreal Engine-powered real-time visualization tool that’s already being used within...

Continue reading…

Democrats demand FTC probe Amazon-iRobot deal

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Federal Trade Commission is facing mounting pressure to block Amazon’s proposed $1.65 billion purchase of iRobot, the company behind Roomba autonomous vacuums.

In a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan on Thursday, a group of Democratic lawmakers argued that the proposed merger would unfairly bolster Amazon’s dominance in the smart home market by acquiring one of the company’s leading competitors. They also criticized Amazon’s data privacy and security practices following past acquisitions of companies like Ring, including data sharing partnerships with over 600 law enforcement agencies across the country.

“iRobot is a powerful market incumbent, and Amazon, given its vast resources, history of producing smart vacuums… and powerful platform,...

Continue reading…

Even Twitter is becoming TikTok

Swipe up for more videos — where have I heard that before? | Image: Twitter

Twitter is joining the bandwagon of social media companies copying TikTok’s everlasting scroll of videos. In a blog post on Thursday, the company announced that it’s updating its video player to be “immersive” — tapping on it will make the video full screen, and if you scroll up, you’ll “start browsing more engaging video content.” The company is also adding a video carousel to its Explore tab, which will show you “some of the most popular videos being shared on Twitter.”

The company says its “immersive media viewer” will start to roll out in the iOS Twitter app over the next few days and that the videos on the Explore tab are “currently available to people in select countries” who are using iOS or Android. Both updates are coming to...

Continue reading…

Mark Zuckerberg tells Meta employees that the company is freezing hiring

Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday that the company is enacting a companywide hiring freeze and warned them that more downsizing is likely coming.

First reported by Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner and confirmed by sources to The Verge, the comments made during an internal all-hands call show how Meta is responding to a decline in its revenue brought on by the slowing global economy and Apple’s ad tracking changes. Meta’s stock price has fallen by more than half this year.

In May, Zuckerberg announced a hiring freeze affecting certain segments of Meta and said he couldn’t make promises about possible layoffs, but by the end of June, his tone had changed. In a Q&A session reported by The Verge, he said, “Realistically, there are...

Continue reading…

Google’s text-to-speech engine is getting new voices across Android apps

Google’s text-to-speech tech is getting new voices across Android apps to improve clarity and sound more natural. | The Verge

The speech engine Speech Services by Google is being upgraded to improve clarity and make text-to-speech voices in Android apps sound more natural. You can hear the difference between the old voices and the updated voices for yourself through prerecorded snippets on the Android Developers Blog.

Frankly, while the voices do sound clearer, I’m skeptical about the claims it sounds more natural. It’s also still difficult to ascertain what the first sentence in these US English-language recordings actually says — is this my gun? Is this my god? Apparently, it says, “is this mic on?” but that was lost on me.

Old

New

All 421 voices in 67 languages within Google’s speech engine are getting a new voice model

All 421 voices in 67 languages...

Continue reading…

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes will continue the story in 2024

Concept art from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes | Image: 20th Century Studios

The next entry in the Planet of the Apes saga will start filming soon — and it has yet another very long name. Today, 20th Century Studios unveiled the first real details on _Kingdom of the Planet of the Ape_s, which picks up the story years after 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes for what’s described as “an all-new chapter.” Production on the film is scheduled to start next month, with Wes Ball, best-known for the Maze Runner trilogy, serving as director.

We don’t know much else about the movie, and it’s hard to glean a lot from the initial concept art (see above). But the studio did reveal some of the cast, including Owen Teague (Black Mirror and the newer It films), Freya Allen (The Witcher), and Peter Macon (The Orville). The...

Continue reading…

Netflix’s gaming lineup keeps getting better with dreamy roguelike Desta: The Memories Between

Image: Ustwo Games / Netflix

The quality of Netflix games has gone from simple, cotton candy-like fluff suitable for short bursts in a waiting room to bespoke, narrative experiences that require hours of strategic thinking. Desta: The Memories Between is the latter.

Now I’m going to say some words that make sense independently but seem confusing when smashed together: Desta is a dreaming dodgeball roguelike friendship simulator. I promise you, it works.

That’s the thing that enamored me of this game: those disparate words and genres, when put together, frickin’ work on a level that I simply have not seen in a mobile game, let alone one brought exclusively to mobile via Netflix — whose first crop of games included such BAFTA hopefuls like Shooting Hoops and Teeter...

Continue reading…

How to create image cutouts in iOS 16

Cut out your pet and paste it into the group chat. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

While the lock screen is one of iOS 16’s marquee features, there’s another fun addition that’s a little less obvious: the ability to easily cut out subjects from pictures. It’s a way to easily separate a subject from a background and quickly share the results or paste them into applications. What would usually take considerable time and effort when using photo editing software can be done with a couple of easy steps in iOS 16. It’s surprisingly good, and you can easily share the results with your group chat for maximum entertainment. Here’s how it works.

I followed these steps on both an iPhone 11 running iOS 16.0.2 and an iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 16.1 developer beta three.

• Open Apple’s Photos app.
• Find a picture in your camera roll...

Continue reading…

The OG App, an ad- and Reels-free Instagram clone, is pulled from the App Store

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

An app appealing to the nostalgia of an Instagram without Reels and recommendations was pulled from the App Store just as developers say it was taking off.

The OG App allows users to log in with their Instagram account and browse without ads, recommendations, and Reels — increasingly obtrusive features on Instagram that have caused widespread pushback from users. The app’s name captures the same sentiment: many users miss the old Instagram.

But just a day after the app officially launched, it was pulled from the App Store on Wednesday, Engadget reports. On Twitter, the OG App creators said the app got 10,000 downloads and was climbing the rankings before it was removed.

Yesterday night, after we received 10,000 downloads,
were #50 on...

Continue reading…

How to watch the 2022 League of Legends World Championship — and what to watch for

Worlds 2021 champions Edward Gaming in Iceland. | Photo by Clive Rose/Riot Games Inc. via Getty Images

The weather is cooling down, leaves are starting to change color, and PSLs are everywhere, which can only mean one thing: it’s time for the League of Legends World Championship. The annual esports tournament, better known simply as Worlds, kicks off on September 29th. Following a few years of competitions hampered by COVID-related restrictions, the 2022 edition looks to be more in keeping with the spectacle fans are used to.

This year, the event is taking place across several cities in North America, starting off in Mexico City and culminating with the finals in San Francisco, where none other than Lil Nas X will be performing at the opening ceremony. As always, there are plenty of intriguing storylines, but keeping up with everything...

Continue reading…

Bowers & Wilkins’ PX8 wireless headphones promise $700 worth of premium sound

Bowers & Wilkins’ new PX8 headphones in tan | Image: Bowers & Wilkins

On paper, there’s little to separate Bowers & Wilkins’ new PX8 headphones from the PX7 S2 model released earlier this year. Battery life is still rated at 30 hours, they still contain six microphones (four for active noise cancellation plus two for calls), and there’s still no dedicated 3.5mm jack.

And yet, the new PX8 costs $699, a whole $300 more than their midrange counterpart. What gives?

Well, B&W argues that “what gives” is its new flagship headphones’ sound quality, thanks to a pair of new 40mm Carbon Cone drive units. These use a similar design to those found in the company’s 700 Series loudspeakers, which start at over $1,000 per pair. “The result is resolution, detail and timing that surpasses the high bar set by the PX7 S2,”...

Continue reading…

Mythic Quest’s third season premieres in November

Image: Apple

The third season of Mythic Quest, the Apple TV Plus show about a group of dysfunctional video game developers, will premiere on November 11th, Apple announced on Thursday. The company’s tweet didn’t share much about what to expect, but you can get an idea of what’s coming in the new season by watching the teaser trailer released in July.

Ian Grimm (played by show co-creator Rob McElhenney) and Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao) appear to have followed through on their plan to leave the show’s fictional game studio, and it seems as if they’ll be dabbling with the metaverse. I’m sure nothing will go wrong with that. That said, the trailer also features a few scenes with them back with the rest of the cast, so maybe they won’t be too far away from...

Continue reading…

Google is shutting down Stadia

Google is refunding all Stadia purchases — hardware, software, and DLC. Members of the Stadia team will be “carrying this work forward” in other departments at Google.

Continue reading…

Waymo pitted its autonomous vehicles against a virtual superhuman driver to see which was safer

Waymo says it has created a new benchmark to measure the safety of its autonomous vehicles. | Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Waymo’s latest effort to prove that autonomous vehicles are safer than silly, accident-prone humans involves creating a virtual representation of a hyper-attentive driver and then pitting this fake person against its own AVs in a series of simulated tests to see which is better at crash avoidance.

(Not to spoil it or anything, but the Waymo vehicle did better.)

Improved safety has been one of the main predictions of the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry. With millions of people dying in auto crashes globally every year, AV operators are increasingly leaning on this safety case to spur regulators to pass legislation allowing more fully autonomous vehicles on the road. But while the argument seems convincing on the surface — AVs don’t get...

Continue reading…

Pikachu adds Ed Sheeran to his growing list of celebrity friends

Pikachu is the star of one of the biggest entertainment franchises around, and as such, he’s unsurprisingly friends with a lot of other celebrities. The electric rat includes the likes of Katy Perry and Post Malone among his inner circle, and now you can add Ed Sheeran to that list.

Sheeran just released his latest music video for the song “Celestial” — not to be confused with Celesteela — and it features notable pocket monsters like Squirtle, Charmander, and Pikachu just hanging out with Sheeran as he goes about his day... before he eventually transforms into a pokémon trainer. The pokémon are all rendered in an adorable cartoon style courtesy of Japanese artist Yu Nagaba.

In a press release, Sheeran explains that he’s been a fan of the...

Continue reading…

LG’s bendable 42-inch OLED TV goes on sale next month for $3,000

LG’s OLED Flex, fully curved. | Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge

LG’s OLED Flex (LX3), a bizarre 42-inch TV that can transform between a curved and flat TV at the push of a button, now has an official price and release date. The South Korean tech giant says it’ll be available in October for $2,999. Alongside it, the company has also announced pricing for the massive 97-inch version of its G2 OLED TV, which costs $24,999 and is available now, as well as the LG OLED Posé (LX1) lifestyle TV, which costs $1,999 for the 55-inch model that’s available now or $1,699 for the 48-inch model coming in November.

Considering the exorbitant $100,000 price tag LG slapped on its rollable TV last year, $2,999 for a bendable TV almost sounds affordable. Granted, the LG OLED Flex is over double the price of this year’s...

Continue reading…

Bitcoin’s climate damage is similar to beef and crude oil, says new study

Bitcoin Mining Data Centers computers are provided energy from natural gas at Renegade Oil & Gas Company site in Elizabeth, Colorado on July 15th, 2022. | Photo by Hyoung Chang / The Denver Post

The environmental and social damage Bitcoin inflicts on the world is comparable to notoriously polluting industries such as beef production and crude oil burned as gasoline, according to new a new study published today in the journal Scientific Reports. The research found that every $1 in Bitcoin market value generated an average of 35 cents in global climate damages between 2016 and 2021.

For comparison, gasoline generated 41 cents, and beef production was responsible for 33 cents in damages. When it comes to both their economic value and environmental impact, Bitcoin is sometimes compared (albeit contentiously) to gold. This new study finds that the climate damages from Bitcoin were actually 8.75 times greater than gold.

“When compared...

Continue reading…

How to record audio on Windows

Samar Haddad / The Verge

Whether you’re recording a podcast, an interview, a message to a friend, or notes to yourself, audio recording is very easy to do on Windows. There are various third-party apps you can use, but Windows 11 also comes with an app called Voice Recorder preinstalled.

You can use that to record yourself easily — no download required. You can also use the app for some basic features, including trimming and exporting the tracks.

Here’s how to use Voice Recorder to record whatever audio you need to.

How to audio record on Windows 10

• Open Voice Recorder. It should come up if you type the name into the search box. If for some reason it’s not showing up, you can download it from the Microsoft Store for free.
• Press the microphone...

Continue reading…

Headspace wants researchers to test how the app works

Photo by Edward Smith / Getty Images

Mental health technology company Headspace Health is calling for researchers to submit proposals for studies on the impact of the company’s tools. The company’s products include both the meditation app Headspace and the digital therapy platform Ginger.

“We see meditation as both a practice rooted in ancient history and a topic of modern science — which is why we’re just as dedicated to studying it as we are to sharing it with the world,” the company wrote on its “Science at Headspace” webpage.

In the statement about the program, Headspace Health noted that research has already found benefits for mental health of both the meditation app and the therapy platform. But there’s still a lot that experts don’t know about mental health apps...

Continue reading…

Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic visual feature gets by on good vibes and even better looks

Entergalactic’s protagonist Jabari, who kinda sorta looks like Kid Cudi. | Netflix

Netflix’s Entergalactic is a ‘television event’ that becomes way more emotionally resonant when you look at it as a companion piece to Kid Cudi’s upcoming album

Continue reading…

PlayerUnknown’s new game sounds outrageously ambitious

A small example of what Melba can do. | Image: PlayerUnknown Productions

Hey, remember PlayerUnknown? As in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or PUBG to your friends? Yeah, well Brendan Greene, aka PlayerUnknown, has provided details surrounding his latest gaming project, codenamed “Artemis,” which aims to be an open-source Earth-sized virtual environment supporting hundreds of thousands of players that can make or play whatever they want.

Here’s the rub, though. Greene also wants users to be able to monetize what they make, essentially turning all user-generated content into NFTs. In an interview with Nathan Brown on the Hit Points newsletter, Greene mentions, “We’re building a digital place that has to have an economy, and it has to have systems at work. And I do believe you should be able to extract value from...

Continue reading…

Eero’s best mesh Wi-Fi routers are back down to their lowest prices

The Eero Pro 6 isn’t the latest model, but it might be all you need. It offers two 5GHz bands and one 2.4GHz band with support for dozens of devices connected simultaneously. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

After a day full of product announcements, Amazon is getting back to cutting prices on its hardware — both new-ish and old-ish. Specifically, there are some great discounts happening once again on the company’s Eero lineup of smart mesh Wi-Fi routers. These prices match the ones that we saw back in early July just before the company launched Prime Day 2022. (Little did we know Amazon was planning another big sale that’s happening soon on October 11th and 12th).

If you want another chance to grab a single Eero Pro 6E for $120 off, you can get one for $179 through Eero or Amazon’s site. This is currently the company’s highest-end router that can blanket up to 2,000 square feet by itself. It also features two ethernet ports and, notably, a...

Continue reading…