Fully kicks off its November site-wide sale with 20 percent off everything

Fully’s Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk is discounted by 20 percent right now. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Fully is joining the growing list of retailers kicking off their Black Friday-adjacent sales. It’s having a site-wide sale this month, taking 20 percent off everything ranging from standing desks to office chairs. Fully makes some of our favorite standing desks and accessories, and any opportunity to save on these home office essentials is worth checking out. Whether you prefer a 30 x 24-inch desk topper made of bamboo or a custom desktop that doubles as a whiteboard, Fully’s work-from-home staples are worth the price. This 20 percent discount also applies to all builds, along with any accessories you’d like to order, which range from powered grommets to help keep your cables under control to a bottle opener hidden underneath your...

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Sega is keeping mini consoles alive

The Astro City Mini V. | Image: Limited Run Games

The company has two new tiny devices, the Astro Mini City V and the Sega Genesis Mini 2, that prove there’s still a place for miniaturized classics.

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Twitter is being sued by former employees for Elon Musk’s mass firing

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is being sued in a class-action lawsuit filed by former employees laid off as part of a mass firing instigated by the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.

The lawsuit alleges that the workers were not given enough notice of their firing in accordance with both the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) and California WARN Act. These acts require that companies give employees at least 60 days of advance notice before a mass firing takes place.

“Look Ma I’m suing Twitter”

The lawsuit was filed in an attempt to “make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who filed the complaint on...

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Why COP27 matters for the climate, but maybe not as much as the hype suggests

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 on November 1, 2021, in Glasgow, United Kingdom. | Photo by Yves Herman - WPA Pool / Getty Images

More than 30,000 people representing governments, businesses, and environmental and human rights groups around the world are expected to gather next week to talk shop on climate change. The occasion is the United Nations’ annual climate summit, called the 27th Conference of the Parties, or COP27, which is scheduled to take place from November 6th through 18th.

Every year, the conference is billed as an opportunity for the world to come together to tackle the climate crisis. World leaders sometimes make new commitments to curb their country’s greenhouse gas emissions or pen agreements with other heads of state to transition to clean energy and funnel money into building a more resilient world. More often, advocates walk away disappointed...

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Samsung Odyssey Ark review: curved and cursed

For its $3,500 price, Samsung left a lot of ambition on the table with the Ark. Its curved, bright, and fast panel doesn’t make up for it not being as rich to look at as a cheaper OLED or as useful with multitasking as a couple of cheap monitors stuck together.

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How Marvel Snap was designed to fit into your life

Second Dinner

The developers at _Marvel Sna_p have done their job a little too well. In an interview with The Verge, the developers spoke about how, when designing Marvel Snap, they wanted to create a game that could “fit into your life.” Well, it seems like I and millions of others have not only managed to fit the game into our lives but have shaped our lives around it. That’s why I play a few quick rounds first thing in the morning, reward my productivity at work with a midday Snap break, and why I must end the day on a dub before I can sleep.

Marvel Snap is the debut game of Second Dinner, an indie studio founded by ex-Blizzard developers, and from the start, they knew they wanted to create a mobile card game. “Marvel Snap is about continuing our...

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Now’s the time to buy last year’s iPad

Is this the 2022 iPad Pro, or is it last year’s model? You can’t tell, and you won’t tell when using it, either. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple’s iPad releases this year have been, well, lackluster to say the least. That isn’t to say the new 10th-gen iPad and the M2-equipped iPad Pro are bad products — far from it. But they either aren’t significantly better than their predecessors or have an awkward value proposition that puts them in between more compelling options in Apple’s lineup.

If you’ve been planning to buy an iPad this year, this is good news because you can confidently purchase last year’s (or even older) models without really giving up much. And based on the pricing we’ve seen on older iPads recently, that can either save you a ton of money or get you a more capable model for the same price you might pay for the latest base version.

Buying an older model also...

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Cherry’s new keyboard switch is inspired by the rare 1980s ‘Nixie’

Cherry’s new MX Black Clear-Top switches. | Image: Cherry

Cherry’s latest mechanical keyboard switch is the MX Black Clear-Top. It’s a design that’s based on a rare linear switch that was produced briefly during the 1980s for Nixdorf keyboards, leading to them being nicknamed “Nixies” by enthusiasts. The retro switches, which are effectively a variant of the linear Cherry MX Black that use a heavier spring and clear, rather than black, plastic case, have since become a highly sought after collector’s item, prized for their supposed smoothness and rich sound.

How highly sought after? Well this review of the Nixie switch from ThereminGoat notes that they’ve been known to sell for $7 a switch. Considering the average keyboard has around 100 keys, that means a full set of Nixie switches could set...

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Substack launches Chat service to better connect writers with readers

The Substack Chat feature was designed to give content creators and writers a way to better connect with their subscribers and online community. | Image: Substack

Substack has launched Substack Chat, a new discussions feature designed to provide content creators with the means to build up their own online communities outside of social media.

Substack Chat allows writers, podcasters, and other creators to host conversations with their audiences, setting a topic for discussion without needing to hack together integrations with services such as Discord, Telegram, or Slack. Chat can be made available for all subscribers or restricted to those that pay for your content.

Substack Chat could be an alternative community for those leaving Twitter

“Chat is a community space reimagined specifically for writers and creators — it’s like having your own private social network where you make the rules,” Substack...

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Elon Musk’s Twitter layoffs start Friday

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

Twitter has notified employees that the company will be “reducing our global workforce” on Friday, November 4th, according to an unsigned internal memo seen by The Verge.

The confirmation comes a week after Elon Musk became Twitter’s new owner and quickly started making changes to how the social network operates and its product roadmap. While the memo doesn't detail the scope of the cuts, they are expected to number roughly half of Twitter’s roughly 7,500 workforce.

You can read the full Twitter memo to employees below:

Team,

In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday. We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made...

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PayPal and Venmo will soon support Apple’s Tap to Pay contactless payments tech

You’ll be able to accept contactless payments on your iPhone through the PayPal or Venmo iOS apps. | Image: Apple

PayPal is going to make it easier for merchants in the US to take payments right on their iPhones. The company is adding support for Apple’s Tap to Pay technology into the PayPal and Venmo iOS apps, meaning merchants will be able to accept contactless credit or debit cards and mobile wallets without an external card reader (via MacRumors).

Apple first announced Tap to Pay in February. Integration with PayPal and Venmo’s apps might mark a notable step up for adoption of Apple’s touchless technology and could be helpful for merchants who don’t want to rely on external readers to accept contactless payments. It will also help PayPal compete with payments rival Square, which launched support for Tap to Pay in September.

Support will be...

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The best deals on MacBooks right now

The 2020 MacBook Air, one of the best laptops you can get, is frequently on sale. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

With multiple configurations and various models to choose from, finding a deal on an M1-equipped MacBook or Mac Mini is not all that difficult. It’s sometimes a slightly different story for the MacBook Pros with the beefier M1 Pro and M1 Max CPUs, but any savings you can get on those Pro models is sure to be worthwhile. As for the newer 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with M2 processors, it may take time to see truly sizable savings.

Here, we’ll run through the discounts that are currently available for the current MacBooks, as well as any deals to be had on the Mac Mini. Of course, you may still find older Intel-based configurations lying around, with some heavy closeout sales. While those are compatible with the , we strongly...

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The date of the big HBO Max and Discovery Plus merger moved up

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In an earnings call today, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced that the merging of HBO Max and Discovery Plus was going so well that the target date for the launch of the new service would be moving from summer 2023 to spring 2023.

From their user interface to their backend to their content, the two services are extraordinarily different, with HBO Max likely leading Discovery Plus in subscriptions as it had approximately 76.8 million users in April before the acquisition, and the combined services now have 94.9 million subscribers. But Zaslav’s plan has always been to merge the two services, which his team views as targeting very different markets. Early this year, a slide claiming HBO Max skewed male and Discovery Plus...

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Sling TV now costs $40 a month, the fourth price hike in five years

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

If you’re paying Dish to stream live TV channels over the internet, prepare for a higher bill yet again: the company’s Sling TV streaming service is raising prices by $5 a month for the fourth time in five years. Sling Orange and Sling Blue pay TV packages will now cost $40 a month each — up from $35 previously — and you’ll pay $55 for the package with both Orange and Blue.

Existing subscribers should see the price increases on the first bill they get after December 3rd; new customers will have to pay the higher rate starting today.

In an official blog post, Sling TV president Gary Schanman blamed the rising cost of programming for the latest price hike, without offering further explanation. We’d probably put money on Disney having...

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Samsung is building an ‘8K’ ultrawide monitor to succeed its massive Odyssey Neo G9

Screenshot by Mitchell Clark / The Verge

Were Samsung’s jaw-dropping 49-inch Odyssey G9 and Neo G9 not enough monitor for you? Did the 55-inch swiveling cockpit that is the Odyssey Ark leave you cold? The electronics and semiconductor giant is preparing to announce an unprecedented 8K resolution version of its massive curved screen, AMD just revealed at its RDNA 3 GPU event.

It’ll feature DisplayPort 2.1, but that’s the only other thing we know as of now. AMD says we’ll get more details at CES 2023 in January.

While the 32:9 aspect ratio of these monitors suggests the screen won’t be a true 8K resolution — for comparison, the “5K” Odyssey G9 has a height of just 1440 pixels to go with its incredible 5,120 pixels of width — it would likely be a substantial improvement in...

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AMD’s next-gen RX 7900 XTX and XT GPUs start at $899, launch December 13th

Image: AMD

AMD has announced its next generation of graphics cards, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, which are the first cards powered by its new architecture, RDNA 3, which uses a chiplet design similar to the company’s Ryzen processors.

Both cards will launch on December 13th, with both AMD’s reference cards, and board partner models set to ship on that date. The 7900 XTX will cost $999, and the XT is $100 cheaper at $899. That represents a significant price jump compared to the previous gen – the top-spec 6950 XT retailed for $849, while the base 6900 XT was $679. Nvidia’s RTX 4080, however, starts at $1199, while the 4090 is an eye-watering $1,599.

There’s been a lot of buzz around AMD’s next generation of cards, with people waiting to see how...

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Vonage to pay $100 million to settle ‘junk fee’ allegations

Getty Images

On Thursday, the internet-based telecom provider Vonage agreed to pay $100 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that it created an artificially burdensome process to cancel the service that included hidden termination fees.

In its complaint, the FTC alleged that Vonage, an Ericsson subsidiary, made it easy for consumers to sign up for its services but far more difficult to cancel. Consumers could sign up for service in a variety of ways, including online and over the phone, but Vonage forced customers to speak with a live “retention agent” in order to cancel service.

Additionally, the FTC claimed Vonage purposefully hid the cancellation number on its website, limited the hours these cancellation calls were...

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The next attempt to launch the Artemis I mission will be at night

The SLS rocket for the Artemis 1 mission on September 27, 2022. | Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

NASA has confirmed its next launch attempt for the Artemis I mission will be at night, with a midnight launch scheduled for the early hours of Monday, November 14th. Following a difficult few months attempting to get the Space Launch System rocket off the ground for the first time, including several wet dress rehearsals, two previous launch attempts, a tanking test, and an interruption from a hurricane, the rocket will begin rolling back out to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida just after midnight on Friday, November 4th.

A night launch means lower visibility, and NASA representatives said they would have preferred a daylight launch. However, the team was confident that a night launch could be done safely and meet all the...

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Blood oxygen monitors face scrutiny from FDA panel

Photo by Jon Akira Yamamoto/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Devices that monitor blood oxygen levels in the hospital and at home need to be more carefully regulated, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel indicated at a meeting Tuesday.

The devices are everywhere in healthcare settings, and people regularly purchase them for at-home use. But research over the past few decades has steadily shown that they don’t work as well for people with darker skin tones — a disparity that became even more critical during the covid pandemic. The FDA issued an alert saying that the devices have “limitations” in 2021.

“We need to take appropriate steps to remove the growing uncertainty around these devices and ensure the health and safety of the public,” anesthesiologist Jesse Ehrenfeld said to the panel...

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VR is still too expensive

The PSVR2 starts at $549.99 and launches next year. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

PlayStation VR2 costs more than the most expensive PS5. I get why, but it’s still too much money.

We’re on the precipice of a new era for virtual reality. Meta just launched its high-end Quest Pro, Sony will be releasing PSVR2 in February, and Apple is heavily rumored to jump into the game with its own VR / AR headset very soon. I’m finally ready to buy a VR headset, and this is the generation that it feels like I should be joining. But now that we’re finally seeing actual prices for them, I’m getting some major sticker shock.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Do I want PSVR2? Yes, but it costs so much.

PSVR2’s $549.99 price is already high, but tack that on with the starting PS5 price of $399.99 and it means...

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With Netflix’s ads tier, you never know what you’re going to get

It’s Netflix — but with ads. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Clicking into something on Netflix’s new ads tier is a roll of the dice: you never know how many ads you might have to sit through.

Netflix Basic with Ads is finally here, offering a cheaper Netflix subscription at $6.99 per month with the tradeoff that you might have to watch some ads with your movies and TV shows. I spent some time messing around with a new account on the tier on Thursday, and while the experience of using Netflix was mostly the same, what struck me was the unpredictability of how many ads I’d have to watch.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

You probably won’t be making this face after you have to watch a third ad.

Netflix says you can expect to see an “average of 4 to 5 minutes of ads per...

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How to set your Google calendar to private

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Recently, journalist, author of Platformer, and former Verge reporter Casey Newton tweeted something that had many readers both laughing and panicking: that entrepreneur David Sacks’ calendar at Twitter was not set to private and, as a result, was being carefully scrutinized by curious Twitter employees.

My favorite silly story of the day: David Sacks’ Twitter calendar is currently not set to private, and employees are analyzing his meeting schedule in an effort to determine what’s going to happen next

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 2, 2022

Laughing because — well, it is funny in an ironic sort of way. Panicking because the next thought of most people will be: is my calendar public?

If you’re one of those people, here is how...

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The mystery of Biden’s deadlocked FCC

Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge, Photo by Pete Marovich / Getty Images

How often do the parent companies of Fox News and MSNBC team up?

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Amazon curbs corporate retail hiring for the rest of 2022

Image: The Verge

Update November 3rd, 1:25PM ET: In a note emailed to employees and posted publicly on November 3rd, Amazon svp of people experience and technology Beth Galetti announced a “pause on new incremental hires in our corporate workforce.”

According to a report by Karen Weise of The New York Times, Amazon is freezing corporate hiring for its retail business for the remainder of 2022 in an effort to hedge its bets against a rough economic forecast.

The hiring freeze includes all corporate and technology positions for Amazon’s retail and operations, which account for the bulk of Amazon sales. However, Amazon’s more profitable cloud computing division won’t be affected. Student hiring and field positions are also exempt from the pause, and B...

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The NYPD has joined Amazon’s Ring Neighbors surveillance network

Amazon Ring spotlight camera. | Image: Ring

The New York Police Department has joined Ring Neighbors, the neighborhood surveillance network built around Amazon’s Ring security cameras. The partnership, announced yesterday, means the NYPD will view people’s posts on Neighbors and be able to post directly to it, including requests for public help on “active police matters.”

Neighbors is a Nextdoor-like extension of Ring’s security camera business, allowing residents of a neighborhood to discuss crime and safety as well as post footage from their cameras. While many law enforcement departments have joined Neighbors in recent years, this marks its adoption by America’s largest police force. (Police could separately request Ring footage for criminal investigations without the app.)...

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OpenAI opens up AI text-to-image generation to businesses with launch of DALL-E API

An example of DALL-E’s “outpainting” function, which generates imagery outside an initial starting frame. | Image: OpenAI

OpenAI is making its image generation software DALL-E much more widely available to businesses with the launch of an API in public beta. The API will make it easier for companies to add DALL-E’s text-to-image functionality to their products, giving developers simplified tools to integrate and customize the software to their liking.

An early use case for the API is Microsoft’s Designer app, which uses the software to generate imagery for Office users, from PowerPoint slides to illustrations for homework. Microsoft is one of OpenAI’s major investors and unveiled the app last month.

Luke Miller, a product manager at OpenAI working on the API, told The Verge that the company was excited to see the new applications developers would find for...

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Elon Musk’s first Hyperloop tunnel in California is gone

The Hyperloop tube hosted student competitions in 2018 and 2019. | Photo by Pauline Acalin for The Verge

Elon Musk’s first prototype Hyperloop tunnel is no more. Bloomberg reports that the roughly one-mile-long white steel tunnel running along Jack Northrop Avenue near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, has been removed and will be replaced with parking spaces for employees.

Perhaps you’ll recall that before Musk assumed the mantle of free speech champion, he set out to circumvent “soul-destroying traffic” by building the Hyperloop, a theoretical system of tunnels that would revolutionize transportation. He also claimed to be able to dig tunnels faster and more efficiently than most current tunnel boring systems, which he rightly argued were laborious and costly.

By pairing these things together, Musk said he could change the...

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Black Friday deals: what time sales start at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and more

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Black Friday officially kicks off on November 25th, but if you plan to make that the only day you buy gifts this holiday season, you’re missing out. Several retailers, including Best Buy and Target, are already getting a head start on rolling out their holiday discounts. Both are even offering price protection through most of the holiday shopping season, so if you buy early and the same item drops to a lower price you can retroactively get that better deal.

Whether you take advantage of the slew of early Black Friday deals or hold off until the day after Thanksgiving, it’s important to know how every major retailer is handling the shopping event this year. If you plan to spend some money, here are the schedules and expectations for the...

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Best Buy is offering Totaltech members a chance to snag a PS5 on November 7th

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

According to the PlayStation 5 product page at Best Buy, Totaltech members will be able to purchase a console starting on November 7th at 12PM ET / 9AM PT. It’s rare that a retailer makes information for console restocks publicly available like this, making this a prime opportunity for Totaltech members to score a PS5. It’s unclear whether anyone attempting to purchase a console will have to go through Best Buy’s queue system to purchase one; however, Best Buy’s product page for the PlayStation 5 mentions that it has “updated their reservation process,” whatever that means. Keep in mind that this restock only applies to the standard disc-based PS5, which, as of recently, has only really been widely available as part of various bundles.

B...

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Lyft to lay off 13 percent of its workforce as economic outlook darkens

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Lyft is laying off 13 percent of its workforce in the second round of major cuts to hit the ride-hailing company this year. The layoffs, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, are expected to affect hundreds of roles. Lyft has more than 4,000 employees, which does not include its drivers.

In an email posted on the company’s website, Lyft CEO Logan Green and president John Zimmer cited “a probable recession sometime in the next year” and rising ride-share insurance costs as among the reasons for the layoffs.

Lyft’s president cited “a probable recession sometime in the next year”

This isn’t the first time that Lyft is slashing roles this year. The company laid off about 60 employees after deciding to shut down its rental...

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