Elon Musk could cut half of Twitter’s workforce

Musk and his advisers are weighing cuts that would affect nearly 4,000 people. | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Twitter employees have been bracing for layoffs since Elon Musk officially took over the company, and details are starting to trickle out about how many people could be affected. Wednesday evening, The Verge’s Alex Heath reports that Musk is meeting with advisors, including fellow former PayPal exec David Sacks, and finalizing a plan to lay off approximately 3,800 employees, while Bloomberg reported that 3,700 would be cut.

According to Bloomberg, the plan is for employees to be informed about the layoffs on Friday, and affected workers could be given 60 days of severance pay. Musk is also planning to end Twitter’s policy that allowed employees to work from home “forever,” Bloomberg reports. This would line up with text messages we’ve...

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Meta is testing a way to mint and sell NFTs on Instagram

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta has announced that it’s testing minting and selling NFTs on Instagram, like you can with many traditional NFT marketplaces, with a “small group of creators in the US” getting access to the feature first. The company’s also expanding Instagram’s NFT showcase feature, which it recently made available to users in over 100 countries. The announcement comes among news of several new ways for creators to make money on its platforms.

Meta says its digital collectibles toolkit will let people create NFTs on the Polygon blockchain (as always, no relation to Polygon the video game news outlet) and then sell them either on Instagram or off the platform. When it comes to displaying NFTs that you’ve purchased elsewhere, the company says you can...

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Elon Musk could enable Twitter’s edit button for everyone

Musk might be charging for verification, but he’s reportedly going to give the edit feature to all users. | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Twitter’s edit feature only turned from myth to something people could actually use in October, but it might be available to everyone very soon. In what might be one of the first big product changes under Elon Musk’s Twitter regime, the company will be opening up the edit feature to all users as early as this week, according to Bloomberg.

Musk and his advisors are meeting to review Twitter’s reduction in force plan. In a Slack channel that was accidentally made visible internally today, a member of Twitter’s legal team said the current plan is to eliminate roughly 3,800 roles https://t.co/8C5fkUSBls

— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 3, 2022

Currently, tweet editing is locked behind the company’s soon-to-change $4.99 Twitter Blue...

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Apple’s own 5G modems might come to iPhones later than expected

Qualcomm will be making a bunch of chips for iPhones next year. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple will once again rely on Qualcomm modems for its 2023 iPhones, Qualcomm said on its Q4 2022 earnings call, meaning that we’ll be waiting a little while longer for Apple to introduce its long-rumored custom 5G modem.

Nikkei reported in 2021 that Apple was looking to introduce its own 5G modem in partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in 2023, and Qualcomm had previously assumed that it would account for 20 percent of modem orders of the 2023 iPhones. However, on Wednesday’s call, Qualcomm CFO Akash Palkhiwala said that the company now expects to “have the vast majority of share of 5G modems for the 2023 iPhone launch.”

Apple bought “the majority” of Intel’s smartphone modem business three months after its s...

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Qualcomm is predicting a ‘double-digit’ drop in phone sales

Qualcomm is expecting phone sales to be less than expected. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Qualcomm, one of the primary providers of chips and modems in phones, is predicting that phone sales will be down much more than expected in 2022 due to the uncertain economic environment, according to the company’s latest earnings release published Wednesday.

“Given the uncertainty caused by the macroeconomic environment, we are updating our guidance for calendar year 2022 3G/4G/5G handset volumes from a year-over-year mid-single-digit percentage decline, to a low double-digit percentage decline,” Qualcomm wrote. The company also says that “rapid deterioration in demand” and “easing of supply constraints” in the semiconductor industry have led to increased inventory and that Qualcomm’s largest customers are having to draw down their...

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How to get a PlayStation 5 this holiday season

Nearly two years later, Sony’s PlayStation 5 remains an elusive holiday gift. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

As Sony’s PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Digital Edition near their second birthday, it seems that supplies of both next-gen consoles are finally catching up with demand (even with a new model reportedly on the way). Restock events are still the norm for snagging a console online, but things get a little more forgiving if you’re willing to visit a brick-and-mortar store, especially if you’re okay with paying a little more upfront for a bundle.

The PS5 is sure to remain a hot-ticket item for holiday shoppers, but we’re beginning to see online stock stick around for several days if not longer, giving would-be buyers a better chance at securing Sony’s next-gen console ahead of the holiday season. And although retailers haven’t announced...

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Google’s building package tracking right into your Gmail inbox

Illustration: The Verge

Google is adding package tracking features to Gmail, which should make it easier to see where your orders are at a glance while you scroll through your emails. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company says you’ll start seeing “a simple, helpful view of your package tracking and delivery information right in your inbox” in the next few weeks.

Gmail will show you the delivery date on the list item for any shipping email, making it so you don’t have to actually open the email and click a tracking link to figure out when you should expect the package. If you do go into the email, though, you’ll see a card with more detailed info. At the moment, it seems as if the feature will be opt-in — when it becomes available, you’ll be able to turn it...

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The best Amazon device day deals

Fire tablets and other Alexa-enabled gadgets are currently on sale at Amazon. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

It’s Alexa’s birthday, and to celebrate, Amazon is discounting a wide range of its smart home products, including Echo devices, Fire TVs, Blink video doorbell systems, and Fire tablets. We’ve outlined a few highlights here that we think are worth checking out. Of course, plenty of other retailers are already kicking off early Black Friday sales, too, if you’re looking for discounts outside of the Amazon ecosystem.

The best Amazon Fire tablet deals

First up, we have some excellent deals on a number of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets. The standard ad-supported model of the 32GB Kindle Fire HD 8 is normally priced at $89.99 but is currently discounted to $44.99, matching the best price we’ve seen for the tablet. You’ll also find a...

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OpenSea is trying to prevent scammers from flipping stolen NFTs

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

OpenSea has announced it will start freezing sales for NFTs that it suspects have been stolen in an attempt to stop scammers and hackers from flipping ill-gotten tokens. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company said it’s “beginning to test a new system” that will mark NFTs caught up in suspicious transactions as “under review,” blocking people from buying them using the platform.

Anne Fauvre-Willis, OpenSea’s VP of operations, marketplace, and integrity, tells Decrypt that the system will look at “a number of industry data sources,” as well as how the NFT was transferred out of the owner’s wallet and what else the wallets involved had going on around the time of the transfer. If it flags a transaction as suspicious, it’ll alert the NFT’s...

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Why Elon Musk is so desperate for Twitter to make money

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

It’s been six days since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, and the changes have been both furious and fast. He’s proposed cataclysmic layoffs — somewhere between 50 percent and 75 percent of the company’s staff, depending on which reports bear out. He’s established an entirely new user tier, in which users will pay $8 a month (formerly $20) to receive algorithm boosts and the prestige of verification. He’s also proposed a paywall feature for videos and there are rumors of a plan for paid direct messages.

The ideas have come so fast that it’s hard to keep track of it all, let alone parse a coherent strategy. But if you take a few steps back, there’s a fairly straightforward theme: Twitter needs to make money and fast. The ideas have...

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Panasonic breaks ground on $4 billion EV battery plant in Kansas

The company will assemble batteries primarily for Tesla. | Image: Panasonic

Four months after selecting De Soto, Kansas, as the location of its future EV battery plant, Panasonic has broken ground on the $4 billion facility — an important step as the US aims to increase the number of electric vehicle batteries that are assembled domestically.

The facility will primarily supply batteries to Tesla, which is the number one seller of EVs in the world and is gearing up to begin production of its Cybertruck at the end of 2023. The factory will focus on rapidly ramping up the manufacture of Tesla’s 2170 cylindrical lithium-ion batteries, which power the company’s Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

Panasonic is also working with Tesla on the next-generation 4680 cells. During the most recent earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon...

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How (and why) to watch the Overwatch League grand finals

Image: Joe Brady

The Overwatch League playoffs are already underway, but it’s not too late to catch the first live grand finals event in two years on Friday, November 4th, broadcast on YouTube. (Get the full playoff schedule here.) We don’t know yet which two teams will be competing in the final match, and any attempt to predict the participants is an act of monumental hubris.

Depending on your perspective, the Overwatch League has this either frustrating or exciting tradition of introducing balance patches right before the playoffs. When that happens, the game’s strategies, known as metas, that have been solidified over the last few weeks of the season are tossed out, and teams have to adapt quickly to a new style of play.

For this year’s playoffs, O...

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With new Microsoft Teams update, bosses can ‘assign seats’ in meetings

Time for a meeting! You know, those things we have. | Image: Microsoft

Picture this. You’re sat down with your direct reports for your weekly virtual meeting over Microsoft Teams. Your presentation is queued. You’re raring to go. But as you scan the sea of camera feeds that faces you, you realize that something is missing. No meeting is truly a meeting, you realize, unless the participating masses are seated before you in a pixelated virtual auditorium, arranged in an order of your choosing.

Don’t worry. Teams has your back. In a recent post on the Microsoft Teams blog, product marketing manager Holly Lehman outlined a number of features that have been added to the software throughout October. These include some genuinely useful additions — live translated captions, detailed call history, and the ability to...

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The best Black Friday deals you can already get at Best Buy

$400 off the latest 14-inch MacBook Pro is one of many great deals already happening at Best Buy. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

November only just arrived, but we’re already seeing a range of Black Friday deals. One of the early offenders is Best Buy, which began marking down a large batch of gadgets last week on October 24th. It’ll add more price cuts once actual Black Friday comes around on the day after Thanksgiving in the US, but barring some items selling out, many of the deals you’ll find below should last through Black Friday.

A few important things to note from Best Buy’s frequently asked questions page: it isn’t offering rain checks on Black Friday deals that sell out, though its great price-matching policy will remain in effect on items until Thursday, November 17th, and won’t be in effect through Cyber Monday, which is November 28th. For items...

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Secretlab Skins let you customize your gaming chair

Secretlabs is finally giving you a way to wash your gaming chair and swap aesthetics | Image: Secretlabs

Secretlabs, a company that’s become synonymous with gaming chairs, is finally giving us a better way to keep your seat clean. Secretlab Skins are available to purchase now directly through Secretlabs and allow you to finally wash off the sweat stains in your gaming chair, you filthy try-hard.

Essentially slipcovers for Secretlabs’ Titan Evo 2022 gaming chair, Secretlab Skins give you a quick and easy option not just for keeping your chair clean but also swapping out its aesthetic. Made from the same SoftWeave fabric used on its gaming chairs, the Skins are all machine washable and are available in seven colorways at launch, in addition to several branded designs as well. Each Secretlab Skin is priced at $169, and more designs will be...

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Google Play Android games now available on PC in beta

Image: Google

Google Play Games is launching in open beta in the US today, allowing anyone to try out a selection of Android games on PC. Google launched an initial beta of the software on Windows PCs earlier this year, but it was limited to Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. Today’s launch sees the beta service expand to the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Available games include 1945 Air Force, Blade Idle, Cookie Run: Kingdom, and Evony: The King’s Return. The app will even sync progress between PCs and mobile so you can continue where you left off on different platforms. While Google continues to add titles to the Play Games catalog, there are only 85 games available worldwide on the service right...

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Comcast’s big rival to Roku and the smart TV is called… Xumo

Image: Comcast

Comcast and Charter have settled on a name for the streaming hardware ecosystem it hopes will give Roku a run for its money: Xumo. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the name of the free ad-supported streaming TV service Comcast acquired in 2020, which will now go by Xumo Play. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like Comcast thinks Xumo is a super rad name and wants to use it again just to make sure everyone has heard how rad it sounds.

Much like the streaming setups offered by Apple, Roku, Google, and Amazon, the Xumo platform will live inside Comcast’s hardware and should let viewers access a network of apps, including the Comcast-owned Peacock and Xumo Play. It’ll also feature other “popular apps,” which will presumably...

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HBO’s The Last of Us series officially premieres in January

The show looks pretty bleak, just like the games. | Image: HBO

The TV adaptation of PlayStation’s postapocalyptic game series The Last of Us debuts on HBO and HBO Max on January 15th. Text in HBO Max spoiled the release date earlier this week, but you can actually circle January 15th on your calendars now that the date has been officially announced. The first season will have nine episodes.

Based on the bleak and brutal trailer released in September, The Last of Us looks to be an extremely faithful adaptation, with many characters from the games appearing in the show. (The trailer also gives a brief and terrifying glimpse at a clicker.) The similarities to the games are probably in large part because Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, the creative director of the games, is an executive producer and...

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Porsche Design is selling a $12,000 speaker built from a 992 GT3 exhaust

The limited-edition 911 Soundbar 2.0 Pro weighs a whopping 143 pounds and features a real Porsche 992 GT3 exhaust. | Image: Porsche Design

Would you buy a $12,000 speaker? Okay, probably not, but would you buy one if it were built into a genuine Porsche 992 GT3 exhaust? The Porsche 911 Soundbar 2.0 Pro is an impractical (but nonetheless rad) custom 2.1.2-channel Dolby Atmos-capable speaker from Porsche Design that’s done just that (via What Hi-Fi, TweakTown).

The 300-watt soundbar features a 4K passthrough HDMI port and can double as a wireless music system thanks to its support for Bluetooth 5.0, Apple AirPlay 2, Google Chromecast, and Spotify Connect. While it certainly makes this a statement piece, that exhaust also comes with a hefty caveat: the product weighs in at almost 144 pounds, so you’ll want to invest in a suitably sturdy surface to place the Porsche 911...

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Google’s new prototype AI tool does the writing for you

Google’s Douglas Eck introducing Wordcraft, an AI-powered creative writing tool, at Google AI@. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

Remember that time Google showed off its artificial intelligence prowess by demoing conversations with Pluto and a paper airplane? That was powered by LaMDA, one of Google’s latest-generation conversational AI models. Now, Google’s using LaMDA to build Wordcraft, a prototype writing tool that can help creative writers craft new stories.

AI-powered writing tools aren’t new. Chances are you’ve heard of Grammarly or copywriting tools like Jasper. What makes Wordcraft a bit different is that it’s framed as a means to help create fictional work. Google describes it as a sort of “text editor with purpose” built into a web-based word processor. Users can prompt Wordcraft to rewrite phrases or direct it to make a sentence funnier. It can also...

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Paramount Plus sees a price hike in its future

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Paramount chief financial officer Naveen Chopra said on an earnings call Wednesday that the company sees “opportunities to increase price on Paramount Plus” and that we’ll see it “do that in the future.” The ad-supported version of Paramount Plus currently costs $4.99 per month (or $49.99 per year), while the commercial-free Premium plan costs $9.99 per month (or $99.99 per year).

If the service does end up raising its price in the US, it won’t be alone. Apple TV Plus just increased its price from $4.99 to $6.99 per month, while Hulu went up from $6.99 to $7.99 per month for its ad-supported plan and jumped from $12.99 to $14.99 per month for its ad-free plan.

Netflix raised prices earlier this year ahead of the launch of its new...

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LG’s 48-inch A2 OLED is still just $570 at Best Buy

LG’s A2 may not have every feature that’s present in pricier OLEDs, but it can still deliver a phenomenal picture. | LG

Having an OLED 4K TV on your wish list used to be a dream that few could afford to make come true, but that’s not the case anymore. If you’re looking for something in the $600 range, Best Buy has the 48-inch LG A2 for $569.99. The previous-gen A1 never dropped so low in price, so it’s great to see that this special discount has stuck around for the past couple of weeks. This OLED TV is one of Best Buy’s top early Black Friday deals, and it’s eligible for the retailer’s extended holiday return period that lasts until January 14th, 2023.

We haven’t tested the A2, but we know that it’s positioned at the bottom of LG’s OLED lineup, below the B2 and C2. The main spec difference between the A2 and pricier models is its standard 60Hz refresh...

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How America turned against the First Amendment

Illustration by Shira Inbar

Moderation laws. Book bans. Courts that keep getting played. America’s politicians are tired of the First Amendment getting in their way, and no one seems to care.

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Google expands flood and wildfire tracking

Flooding in Sanford, Florida, after Hurricane Ian. | Photo by Pauln Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Google announced a big expansion of its flood forecasting and wildfire tracking services today. It launched a tool called Flood Hub globally, which patches together forecasting across 20 countries. Google is also rolling out improved wildfire tracking to a few more countries after piloting the program in the US.

Half of the world lacks adequate early warning systems for disasters like floods and fires, a United Nations report found last month. That’s a lack of lifesaving technology that can give people enough lead time to get themselves to safety. The hope is that Google’s services can fill in some gaps, especially as climate change makes floods and fires even more dangerous than they were in the past.

The hope is that Google’s...

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Google plans giant AI language model supporting world’s 1,000 most spoken languages

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google has announced an ambitious new project to develop a single AI language model that supports the world’s “1,000 most spoken languages.” As a first step towards this goal, the company is unveiling an AI model trained on over 400 languages, which it describes as “the largest language coverage seen in a speech model today.”

Language and AI have arguably always been at the heart of Google’s products, but recent advances in machine learning — particularly the development of powerful, multi-functional “large language models” or LLMs — have placed new emphasis on these domains.

Google has already begun integrating these language models into products like Google Search, while fending off criticism about the systems’ functionality. Language...

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Fujifilm’s new X-T5 pivots back to photography

The X-T5 will feel a lot like home to Fujifilm loyalists.

The new X-T5 mirrorless camera is a bit of an apology letter from Fujifilm to its fans, who disliked the video-focused features creeping into their favorite photo camera line. Where the X-T4 got a little bloated in size and featured a flip-out screen better equipped for video, the new X-T5 pares things down to put still-image capture at the forefront.

The X-T5 is smaller and lighter than the previous model, and it borrows the 40-megapixel APS-C sensor, fifth-gen X Processor, subject-detection autofocus, and seven-stop in-body image stabilization from the pro-oriented X-H2. This new camera costs the same as its predecessor, as it will sell for $1,699.95 for the body in silver or black when it launches November 17th. Alongside it is a new...

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Google’s text-to-image AI model Imagen is getting its first (very limited) public outing

Imagen will be available in Google’s AI Test Kitchen app. | Image: Google

Google is being extremely cautious with the release of its text-to-image AI systems. Although the company’s Imagen model produces output equal in quality to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, Google hasn’t made the system available to the public.

Today, though, the search giant announced it will be adding Imagen — in a very limited form — to its AI Test Kitchen app as a way to collect early feedback on the technology.

AI Test Kitchen was launched earlier this year as a way for Google to beta test various AI systems. Currently, the app offers a few different ways to interact with Google’s text model LaMDA (yes, the same one that the engineer thought was sentient), and the company will soon be adding similarly...

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Avatar: The Way of Water’s latest trailer is a wet and wild prelude to war

Jake Sully riding on the back of one of Pandora’s fantastical animals. | 20th Century Studios

The Na’vi of James Cameron’s Avatar movies are a peaceful, nature-loving people who live in harmony with most all of the creatures that live and thrive on the planet Pandora. But in the latest trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water, the Na’vi’s spiritual reverence for their world comes with a side of militant readiness as their people prepare to go to war to protect their homes.

Avatar: The Way of Water’s new trailer features a bevy of gorgeous new shots from the film that showcase just how central Pandora’s oceans and aquatic life will be to its story of how Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have started a family in the years following the first Avatar.

Throughout the trailer, you can see brief glimpses of their son...

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The Flipper Zero is a Swiss Army knife of antennas

Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge

Every once in a while, something comes along that every nerd out there covets. I have lost more than my fair share of time and money on my MiSTer, I have pined for a Steam Deck, and I am currently following restock bots for any Raspberry Pi I can get my hands on for less than 100 bucks during the Grand Pi Shortage of 2022.

But few devices have captured the imagination of your friend who works in IT quite like the Flipper Zero: a hacking multi-tool shaped like a playful child’s toy and adorned with a friendly dolphin. Packed with a range of sensors, chips, and antennas, the Flipper lets you make playful mischief with all sorts of devices, from security gates to card readers.

There are drawbacks to the mischief business. The company that...

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PlayStation VR2 launches on February 22nd for $549.99

Image: Sony

Sony will launch its PS VR2 headset on February 22nd priced at $549.99. The PS VR2 will be priced at $549.99 in the US, €599.99 across Europe, £529.99, and ¥74,980 in Japan. The VR headset itself will include Sense controllers and stereo headphones, but a Sense controller charging station will be available separately, priced at $49.99 (€49.99 / £39.99 / ¥5,480).

Preorders for the PS VR2 will begin on November 15th, limited to Sony’s PlayStation online store in many markets including the US, UK, France, and Germany. Games, including Horizon Call of the Mountain, will also be available to preorder later this month.

The PS VR2 headset is a major upgrade over the original, with an OLED screen, a 110-degree field of view, and 4K HDR support....

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