How to use your Apple Watch to control other devices

The Apple Watch can act like a mini remote control for your wrist. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

It is an inevitable truth that you will, at some point, lose the remote control. Perhaps it’s fallen into an interdimensional hole between couch cushions. Maybe your cat is sitting on it. Or, worst-case scenario, the remote is out of batteries and the last episode of your show ended on a cliffhanger. The good news? You can use your Apple Watch to control your TV.

The ability to control devices from your wrist isn’t limited to TVs, either. If you’re already ensconced within Apple’s ecosystem, you can also use the Apple Watch to control your iPhone and iPad. If you use HomeKit, it’s an easy way to control your smart home without having to pull out your phone at all. Regardless of which device you want to control, here’s how to do it.

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Here’s when you can expect Samsung’s One UI 5.1 update

Samsung has announced which devices will be the first to receive the new One UI 5.1 update, with support for more models to arrive in the coming weeks. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

We got our first look at One UI 5.1 at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event earlier this month, the latest Android 13-based interface for the yet unreleased Galaxy S23 series. Now, Samsung has announced all of the other devices getting the One UI 5.1 software update via a worldwide rollout, starting with the Galaxy S22 series, Z Fold 4, Z Flip 4, S21 series, and S20 series, with more devices including the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Z Flip 3 being added in the coming weeks.

SamMobile has a detailed release timeline it says comes directly from Samsung for all models currently expected to receive the update through the first week of March, including several Galaxy A-series devices. As these software updates are usually released incrementally, you may...

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Mazda MX-30 electric SUV review: a perfect storm of range anxiety

I spent more time charging than driving the Mazda MX-30 EV.

The 2022 Mazda MX-30 gets a 35.5kW battery that will get you an EPA-estimated 92 miles of range combined, making the MX-30 one of the shortest-range EVs on the market.

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Oppo launches Find N2 Flip internationally to compete with Samsung’s Z Flip 4

The phone is available in black (left) and purple.

As promised, Oppo is providing international release dates for the Find N2 Flip, first announced in China last December. In the UK, the phone will go on sale for £849 (around $1,025) on March 2nd, and it’ll also be available in other European markets like France, Spain, and Italy (we’ve followed up with Oppo to confirm release dates and pricing in these regions). The phone isn’t getting an official release in North America.

The Find N2 Flip is a direct competitor to Samsung’s Z Flip devices in that it’s a smartphone-size device that can fold down when you need it to be more compact. But its unique selling point is that it has a far larger 3.26-inch cover display versus the Z Flip 4’s 1.9-inch secondary display. A larger screen means more...

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Tesla’s plan to open its Superchargers to non-Tesla EVs takes shape

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

New details about Tesla’s plan to open up its Supercharger network to non-Tesla electric vehicles were revealed this week. And hilariously, the White House remains our best source of information about this potentially transformational plan.

Elon Musk’s company will make 7,500 Supercharger stations available to non-Tesla EVs by the end of 2024, the White House says in a fact sheet about its EV charging investments that it published Wednesday. Under new White House standards issued last year, the company is required to make its chargers accessible to the “broadest number of people” in order to qualify for billions in federal funding.

Hilariously, the White House remains our best source of information on this potentially transformational...

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The best streaming device to buy right now

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

The Apple TV 4K checks all the boxes and is the most pleasant to use, but plenty of people will be just fine with a Chromecast, Roku, or Fire TV.

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Your next swipe might be on an AI chatbot

Image: Jovana Mugosa / The Verge

People are burned out on dating apps. In reporting Land of The Giants: Dating Games, we spoke to dozens of daters who are tired of navigating several apps at a time, optimizing their profiles, and facilitating dozens of conversations that go nowhere. So where do singles go from here?

The final episode ofour series explores the hottest trend in tech — artificial intelligence. We’ll speak with the CEO of a Gen Z dating app that allows users to train avatars to go on dates for them: “You don’t have to get dressed up. You don’t have to go out to a coffee shop or a bar to meet somebody to discover in the first 5 minutes you’re not compatible.” And we’ll speak with people who have fallen in love with the AI chatbot companions they’ve made on...

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The first trailer for Extrapolations features a cast only Apple money can buy

Image: Apple

Apple has released the first trailer for its upcoming limited drama Extrapolations, the latest anthology series from writer, director, and executive producer Scott Z. Burns (Contagion, The Bourne Ultimatum). The show is loaded with Hollywood A-listers, with appearances from Meryl Streep, Kit Harington, Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker, Tobey Maguire, Gemma Chan, Sienna Miller, and David Schwimmer, to name but a few.

Extrapolations spans eight episodes that cover a 33-year timespan, exploring a future Earth impacted by devastating climate change and how the necessary adaptations required to survive the environmental crisis influence love, faith, work, and family.

Image: Apple

Nothing encompasses the apocalyptic...

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Here’s why you’re still waiting for Bing AI

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft opened up the waitlist for its Bing AI preview last week, and after 1 million people signed up in 48 hours the company is now explaining why it’s taking some time to unlock it for millions of people.

Microsoft is testing the Bing AI service in 169 countries around the world, and the company says it’s prioritizing people with Bing and Edge as their default search engine and browser, as well as those with the Bing mobile app installed. That’s why Bing briefly rose to the top of the App Store last week.

“If you’re on the waitlist, just hang tight,” explains Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing. “As we said at launch, we intend to scale to millions of people beginning in the coming weeks. We’re only one week in!”

H...

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Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra review: practically peerless

It’s big, expensive, and occasionally weird. But the S23 Ultra lives up to its name.

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Less money and more fear: what’s going on with tech

The face of a man who will be increasing interest rates again. | Image: Julia Nikhinson/Getty Images

You notice that flop sweat the tech industry has been in lately? Welcome to the new economic environment.

In November 2021, in response to inflation, the Fed announced it would hike interest rates. It’s not done, either — the Fed has indicated it will continue to hike until enough of us are unemployed. I’m sure the Mr. Burns-steepling-fingers style the Fed is taking is just a coincidence.

This is a big deal because the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates low pretty much since the 2008 financial crisis. Borrowing money is now more expensive than it’s been in over a decade. That means that a lot of investors aren’t being forced to look to stocks for returns — they can invest in bonds or treasuries instead. And that changes some things...

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Qualcomm’s new smartphone modem aims to bridge tricky coverage situations

Qualcomm has a new modem-RF chip ready in time for Mobile World Congress. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

sQualcomm is warming up for Mobile World Congress by announcing its newest modem: the Snapdragon X75. It updates last year’s X70, which is in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered phones just hitting the market like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and OnePlus 11 5G. This time around, Qualcomm is getting its modem-RF chip ready for the next wave of 5G advances, in addition to enabling more powerful uplink and downlink connections and using AI to help your phone stay better connected in tricky spots.

The X75 is equipped for 3GPP’s release 17 and 18, which establish the standards for the next phases of 5G technology. Release 18, in particular, marks the start of a phase called 5G Advanced, which is where we’ll see 5G in more applications like...

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Hello Tomorrow’s techno-optimism hides something much darker

Billy Crudup in Hello Tomorrow. | Image: Apple

The new Apple TV Plus series tells a story of deceit and scams, doused in the bright and sunny style of 1950s retrofuturism.

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Wednesday’s top tech news: Another year of the Chief Twit

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images

Plus a look inside the upcoming PSVR2.

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Elon Musk says Twitter should be ready for new CEO by end of year

Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty IMages

Twitter CEO Elon Musk says he might be ready to step down as head of the social media network by the end of the 2023, by which time it’ll be a year since millions of Twitter users voted for him resign from the role — a poll Musk said he’d honor.

“I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out,” Musk said via video link at the World Government Summit in Dubai, as reported by Bloomberg. “I’m guessing probably towards the end of the year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company.”

“I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year,” Musk said. He didn’t offer any indication of who could be in line to take the...

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Sony’s PSVR2 teardowns reveal how the headset tracks the Sense controllers

Image: Sony

The PlayStation VR2 headset can track the accompanying Sense controllers thanks to a bunch of IR LEDs hidden in the orb-shaped controllers, according to new teardown videos Sony posted Tuesday evening.

Under the Sense controller cover, the controller itself has a ring of 14 IR LEDs and three placed elsewhere for tracking, as shown in the Sense teardown video. “These infrared lights are used by the VR headset’s tracking camera to detect the controller’s position and orientation,” Sony’s Takeshi Igarashi, who also designed the DualSense controller, explains in the video. “The LEDs have been placed in optimal locations to ensure they are accurately detected no matter what direction the controller is facing.” And the cover on the controllers...

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Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first

Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge, photo by Christian Marquardt / Getty Images

This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained by Platformer.

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe...

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Google Fiber’s 5-gig internet service starts rolling out in three cities

Image: Google Fiber

Google Fiber is now offering 5 Gbps speeds in certain markets (via Engadget). Customers in Kansas City, West Des Moines, and the Salt Lake City metropolitan area will be the first to get the option for the speedier tier, which is rolling out now. Late last year, Google started testing limited access to Fiber’s faster 5-gig and even 8-gig packages for some customers in those same areas.

The new 5 Gbps offering will cost subscribers $125 a month and includes an optional Wi-Fi 6 router, up to two mesh extenders, and professional installation that also upgrades homes to be 10Gbps-ready.

Google Fiber’s 5 Gbps internet offers symmetrical upload and download speeds for those who work heavily in the cloud with large files and is a big upgrade...

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Tweetbot’s creators added an edit button to their Mastodon client

Image: Tapbots

The developers who created the now-discontinued Tweetbot client have added an edit button to Ivory, their app for Mastodon. This comes bundled with a couple of other updates for Ivory’s iOS app, including the ability to report users and posts, as well as support for Mastodon’s server language translation services.

Tapbots, the company behind both apps, has been gradually bringing new features to its new Mastodon client after Twitter unceremoniously stopped supporting third-party apps last month and later announced new rules that require developers to pay for access to Twitter’s application programming interface (API).

While Ivory’s still in early access, Tapbots says there’s much more to come, like quote posts and support for custom...

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Amazon’s weird toaster-shaped robotaxi hits the road in a ‘first’ for the company

Image: Zoox

Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Amazon, said that its toaster-shaped driverless vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals was approved to drive on public roads with passengers in California. The company celebrated the milestone as the “first time in history a purpose-built robotaxi — without any manual controls — drove autonomously with passengers.”

Zoox is one of dozens of companies currently testing AVs on public roads in the Golden State. And while it trails behind competitors like Waymo and Cruise in the race to commercialize the technology, it is making advancements by introducing a new kind of vehicle to the road — one that lacks traditional controls and could hardly be described as a “car” in the modern sense of the...

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Instagram is getting rid of live shopping

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Instagram will no longer let creators tag products in livestreams starting in March, the company announced on Tuesday. “Beginning on March 16, 2023, you will no longer be able to tag products in live broadcasts on Instagram,” the company wrote on an Instagram support page. “This change will help us focus on products and features that provide the most value to our users.”

The change marks Meta’s next big step away from live shopping. The company is kicking the shopping tab out of Instagram’s home feed in February, and it shut down live shopping on Facebook in October. However, shops on Instagram aren’t entirely going away. “You will still be able to set up and run your shop on Instagram as we continue to invest in shopping experiences for...

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Spotify’s new activist investor is keeping a close eye on podcast spending

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.

I hope you all had a great weekend. Today, we have the final lineup for Hot Pod Summit next week, including a new headliner. Plus, Spotify’s new activist investor and Rihanna’s post-Super Bowl streaming spike. Let’s get into it!

Activist investor takes stake in Spotify, and it is all for company cuts

There is even more pressure for Spotify to be lean now. Last week, it was reported that activist investor ValueAct had purchased a stake in the streamer. Mason Morfit, who leads the firm, disclosed the new position at a private conference at Columbia University and indicated that he was on board with the cuts Spotify has been making.

“...

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These companies are making solar cells out of fake Moon dirt

A working solar cell prototype Blue Origin says it made from simulated Moon dirt. | Image: Blue Origin

The idea of using dirt on the Moon to manufacture solar cells, which could power a permanent human settlement, may seem outlandish, but two companies say they’ve made big progress on that front: they each say they’ve already made solar cells using fake Moon dirt.

Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin says it’s been making solar cells this way since 2021 but just made that information public in a blog post on Friday. Separately, Lunar Resources, which aims to develop technologies for the “large-scale industrialization of Space,” told _The Verg_e in a call today that it’s been doing the same for the last couple of years.

The hope is that the technology might one day power human life on the Moon

Each company still has to make an enormous leap: from...

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TP-Link’s new smart plug exposes a complicated Matter

The TP-Link Tapo smart plug is one of the first Matter devices. It’s fast and easy to use with Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or SmartThings thanks to the new smart home standard. But when it comes to sharing, it all falls apart.

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The best streaming service deals available right now

If you’re eligible, you can stream The Last of Us on HBO Max while saving money. | Image: HBO

Now that winter’s cold weather is upon us, a lot of us are spending more time indoors and bingeing movies and . And while it’s true that most streaming services don’t cost very much, we all know that those monthly subscription fees have a way of adding up in the long run. Before you know it, you’re spending as much on streaming as you would on cable.

However, if you’re trying to cut down on your expenses (and who isn’t these days?), you don’t necessarily need to unsubscribe from everything. In fact, we’ve found a few ways for you to save on your monthly subscriptions. It turns out a variety of platforms are offering deals right now, some of which are even available to new and returning subscribers alike. Below, we’ve curated some of the...

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Tesla workers in New York are trying to form the company’s first union

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A unionization campaign has kicked off at Tesla’s second Gigafactory in upstate New York, as reported by Bloomberg News. Workers at the Buffalo plant have submitted their intent to unionize with the help of Workers United, which has been behind widespread organized labor efforts among Starbucks employees and, as the report notes, started at a store just a few miles away from the Tesla plant.

Employees at the facility sent Tesla CEO Elon Musk an email this week saying they intend to unionize. Musk has previously been hostile toward unionization efforts that included alleged threats and retaliation against employees and an anti-union tweet the NLRB is arguing he should delete (it remains online). If successful, this could be the first...

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Facebook is going to explain more about how machine learning decides the ads you see

Image: Meta

Meta is updating Facebook’s ad transparency tools to better explain how it uses machine learning to decide which ads you see you.

Starting Tuesday, when you tap the “Why am I seeing this ad?” message on an ad, you’ll see the following information, according to a blog post from Meta’s Pedro Pavón:

Information summarized into topics about how your activity both on and off our technologies — such as liking a post on a friend’s Facebook page or interacting with your favorite sports website — may inform the machine learning models we use to shape and deliver the ads you see.

New examples and illustrations explaining how our machine learning models connect various topics to show you relevant ads.

More ways to find our ads controls. You...

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How to use iPhone’s Safety Check and Emergency SOS features

Samar Haddad / The Verge

While there has — rightly — been a great deal written and broadcast about how to deal with attacks and privacy violations online and via social media, there is now increasing attention being paid to helping people stay safe in their homes and out in the world. Two features offered via Apple’s iPhones — one just introduced in iOS 16 — can help people who may need to separate themselves from dangerous people or situations: Safety Check and Emergency SOS.

Safety Check

One of the most significant new features in iOS 16 is Safety Check, which is specifically meant for people who find themselves in a difficult or abusive situation at home.

It is very common for friends and partners to share various apps and features such as photos, calendars,...

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BuzzFeed’s first AI-generated articles are ad-lib quizzes

Image: BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed’s first quizzes that integrate AI writing tools are live today, with Valentine’s Day-themed content like, “Date Your Celeb Crush With The Magic Of AI” and “This AI Quiz Will Write A Rom-Com About You In, Like, Less Than 30 Seconds.” The result is a slightly more interesting Mad Libs — and a much more tedious way to use ChatGPT.

In a memo to staff last month, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told staff the company would “lead the future of AI-powered content and maximize the creativity of our writers, producers, and creators and our business.”

The first set of quizzes prompts users to input information like names, favorite foods, or a location, and the tool spits out a personalized block of text generated using artificial...

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These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft’s new Bing AI keeps telling a lot of people that its name is Sydney. In exchanges posted to Reddit, the chatbot often responds to questions about its origins by saying, “I am Sydney, a generative AI chatbot that powers Bing chat.” It also has a secret set of rules that users have managed to find through prompt exploits (instructions that convince the system to temporarily drop its usual safeguards).

We asked Microsoft about Sydney and these rules, and the company was happy to explain their origins and confirmed that the secret rules are genuine.

“Sydney refers to an internal code name for a chat experience we were exploring previously,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge....

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