Rivian’s new ‘Performance’ powertrain lets R1T reservation holders keep their big battery

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge

Rivian unlocked a new Dual-Motor Performance AWD option for its R1T electric pickup truck and R1S SUV on Thursday, and the automaker is now allowing eligible order holders with configurator access to select the new drivetrain. The news comes after Rivian announced last month that “thousands” of R1T reservation holders will be receiving invitations to configure their trucks for delivery in the next one to four months after order confirmation.

The 700-horsepower Performance Dual-Motor AWD (previously known as the “enhanced” Dual-Motor) is a software-unlocked version of the standard 600-horsepower Dual-Motor that quickens its 0–60 mph acceleration from 4.5 seconds down to 3.5 seconds. The upgrade adds $5,000 to the price of the R1T, which...

Continue reading…

One of Elon’s handpicked ‘Twitter Files’ writers quits Twitter over its Substack restrictions

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Matt Taibbi has announced that he’s leaving Twitter amid the company’s ongoing spat with newsletter platform Substack.

If Taibbi’s name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, perhaps the phrase “Twitter Files” might. Using access granted by Twitter CEO and self-avowed free speech enthusiast Elon Musk, Taibbi and other journalists have shared internal Twitter information that was intended to reveal how corrupt the company’s previous leadership was. (What they actually revealed was Jack Dorsey’s personal email address and some sloppy journalism. Oops.)

Twitter seems to be in a drag-out fight with Substack, blocking users from liking, replying to, or retweeting many tweets with Substack URLs and, in what appears to be an escalation, limiting how...

Continue reading…

Western Digital’s My Cloud is still down, but there’s a workaround

Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images

It’s April 7th, and you know what that means? That’s right. It means that Western Digital’s cloud network has officially been down for five days.

On April 2nd (this past Sunday), the data storage manufacturer announced that it was experiencing a service outage impacting a whole bunch of products, including My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS5, SanDisk ibi, and SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger. The company said that it was “working to restore service” and apologized for the inconvenience.

In the days that followed, we didn’t hear all that much. Western Digital issued a follow-up statement on April 3rd that said basically the exact same thing, as well as a press release clarifying that it was “implementing proactive...

Continue reading…

Substack writers say Twitter’s newsletter ban is bad for business — and worse for Twitter

Illustration by The Verge

This week, Twitter began restricting the promotion of links to Substack newsletters, a move that seems to fly in the face of owner Elon Musk’s vocal support of free speech on the platform. The change is a huge problem for Substack writers, who have found Twitter to be one of the best places to attract new subscribers to their newsletters.

“It appears that Musk is making decisions based on his own financial interests and petty grievances — even if it makes Twitter objectively worse for users,” Judd Legum, author of Popular Information, a politics-focused newsletter with more than 240,000 subscribers, says in an email to The Verge. “If this continues, it’s hard to justify continuing to invest my time creating content on Twitter.”

The ban...

Continue reading…

Microsoft sold software to sanctioned Russian companies, says US government

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft has agreed to pay over $3 million in fines for selling software to sanctioned entities and individuals in Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Russia from 2012 to 2019. The US Department of the Treasury says that “the majority of the apparent violations involved blocked Russian entities or persons located in the Crimea region of Ukraine” and that the company will be paying around $2.98 million to the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (or OFAC) and $347,631 to the Department of Commerce. (It settled for $624,013 but will receive a credit for its agreement with the Treasury.)

According to an enforcement notice from OFAC, Microsoft, Microsoft Ireland, and Microsoft Russia failed to oversee who was buying the company’s software and...

Continue reading…

How one Twitter account disappeared for a week — and why nobody knew how to fix it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

(Disclosure right up front: SB Nation is part of Vox Media, and so is The Verge; we’re all co-workers and friends. I reported this story mostly by talking to my colleagues.)

SB Nation’s Twitter account has a little over 300,000 followers. Or, at least, it did last Friday. Then, suddenly, it was gone, disappeared from the internet for almost a week. When you go to the profile page, the account was replaced by an ominous message: “This account doesn’t exist.” Nobody at SB Nation knew how to get it back — and for a while, nobody at Twitter did, either.

Last Friday, an SB Nation employee tried to log in to the @sbnation account. They were doing so in order to follow @cutwaterspirits, the Twitter account for Cutwater, an adult beverage...

Continue reading…

Someone keeps accusing fanfiction authors of writing their fic with AI, and nobody knows why

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Artificial intelligence has... let’s say, a fraught relationship with the arts community, and transformative fandom is no exception. Many fans have embraced some tools like Character.ai bots, but plenty have also bristled at the prospect of text generators getting trained on their fanfiction; in my fandom circles, I’ve seen a few people say the prospect of an AI-created content flood discourages them from writing. And in the past week, the backlash has created an odd second-order complication: someone is rampantly accusing non-AI fan writers of being “AI-using cheaters,” and as far as I can tell, nobody quite knows why.

According to posts and responses on Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr, a slew of authors have been receiving apparent spam...

Continue reading…

Fortnite and Roblox are dueling for the future of user-built games

Image: Epic Games

The two giants are part of a race to become something akin to the YouTube of gaming.

Continue reading…

Now everyone claims Microsoft will build a data center on the Foxconn land in Wisconsin

Foxconn’s dome in Wisconsin, with the “high performance computing” shipping container next to it. | Image: Nilay Patel

The Foxconn land in Wisconsin may finally be used for a meaningful technology project — but not by Foxconn.

Last week, the village board of Mount Pleasant voted to allow Microsoft to build a data center on land previously cleared for the Foxconn LCD fab that never arrived. Microsoft will buy the land for $50 million, some of which will be used to reimburse Foxconn for releasing its rights to the land. It does not appear that Foxconn will play any part in operating the data center itself.

The announcement came days before an election in which the board incumbents narrowly defeated challengers critical of the Foxconn deal.

Foxconn spokesperson Rusty Schultz declined to comment on the record, instead pointing to an unattributed statement p...

Continue reading…

Substack founders fire back at Twitter over restrictions and rules that ‘change on a whim’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Substack’s founders have responded to Twitter’s new restrictions on promoting tweets with links from the publishing platform, telling The Verge that writers’ livelihoods “should not be tied to platforms where they don’t own their relationship with their audience, and where the rules can change on a whim.”

On Thursday night, Twitter users noticed that they couldn’t like, reply to, or retweet some tweets that had Substack links in them. Twitter hasn’t said why it made the change — or if the change was even intentional — but the timing is certainly suspect, given that it happened about a day after Substack announced its own Twitter-like “Notes” product.

And there’s precedent for Twitter putting restrictions on links from a rival platform....

Continue reading…

The stainless steel Apple Watch Series 7 is down to its lowest price yet

It may not be fancy-pants titanium or an Hermes edition, but that sleek steel looks much nicer than the basic aluminum. | Image: Apple

Look, the Apple Watch Series 8 is a perfectly fine device. But have you considered that it’s also kind of boring? Sure, it sometimes goes on sale for as low as $329, but it’s not exactly a huge upgrade over the last-gen Series 7. Now, as a much more exciting alternative, Walmart is selling the stainless steel Apple Watch Series 7 in the 41mm cellular configuration with a Milanese Loop strap for $399 ($350 off). You can also pick up the 45mm version with LTE for $429 ($370 off).

Aside from Crash Detection and a new temperature sensor for cycle tracking, the Apple Watch Series 7 is nearly on par with its newer Series 8 brethren. It’s got your usual litany of fitness, heart rate, and sleep tracking, as well as an always-on display and IP6X...

Continue reading…

Substack had negative revenue

Pictured: a business I suspect is collapsing. | Image: Substack

Is there a funnier phrase in the English language than “negative revenue”?

Look, I felt pretty confident Substack was doing badly when it failed to raise from VC and went to retail investors. (Hot tip: the phrase “financial inclusion” indicates that the speaker thinks you are a sucker.) And there were other signs: the uptick last year of newsletter cross-promotions and then-spokesperson Lulu Cheng Meservey’s desperate hollering for attention. (I will assume any business that hires her going forward is in deep trouble.)

Signs are not the same as numbers, though, and according to a story from The Information this morning, the numbers are rough. Even I was surprised to see that Substack lit $25 million on fire in 2021. And though it had...

Continue reading…

Sony tells regulators Microsoft could sabotage its ability to win Digital Foundry comparisons

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Sony told regulators in the UK that they were “irrational” for having sided with Microsoft in the fight over the proposed Microsoft-Activision merger. One reason: Microsoft could sabotage future Call of Duty games by making performance even slightly worse on PlayStation — because gamers are apparently so perceptive that it might make them move to Xbox.

Although Sony stated previously that Microsoft’s merger with Activision Blizzard, which makes Call of Duty games, could hurt the franchise on PlayStation, the company’s latest arguments get even more specific. This time around, Sony’s saying Microsoft won’t feel the need to “make use of the advanced features in PlayStation not found in Xbox.” It even goes so far as to say that “degrading...

Continue reading…

Google will shut down Dropcam and Nest Secure in 2024

One more year. | Will Joel / The Verge

Google is ending support for the Dropcam and the Nest Secure home security system in one year, on April 8th, 2024. They are among the few remaining Nest products that haven’t been brought over to Google Home, and their demise hints that the new Google Home app might almost be here. At least, no more than a year away. Surely.

Google is also winding down the last few legacy Works with Nest connections, but not ‘til September 29th.

Image: The Verge

Good looking out.

Dropcam had a good run

Existing Dropcam cameras will keep working until April 8th, 2024, after which you won’t be able to access them from the Nest app. To soften the blow, Google’s offering a free indoor wired Nest Cam to Dropcam owners who...

Continue reading…

NASA’s powerful new air quality monitor has launched into space

NASA’s new air quality monitoring instrument, TEMPO. | Image: Maxar via NASA

NASA sent a powerful new instrument into space overnight to track air pollution. If all goes well, it should be able to zoom in to see how air quality changes from neighborhood to neighborhood across North America. That could fill in big data gaps that hide disparities when it comes to who has to live with the most pollution.

The tool is called TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument. It will keep a tab on three harmful pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and ground-level ozone. Together, they’re key ingredients for smog.

It should be able to zoom in to see how air quality changes from neighborhood to neighborhood across North America

Three out of eight Americans live in counties that earned F...

Continue reading…

The sudden death and rebirth of Tweetbot

Image: Mengxin Li / The Verge

Tweetbot’s sudden death, open-casket funeral, and reincarnation as a Mastodon app.

Continue reading…

Chasing rainbows

Mengxin Li / The Verge

Apparently, the very idea of colorblindness is hard to visualize. Take a shot at looking through my eyes.

Continue reading…

Three new Star Wars movies are on the way

Daisy Ridley in The Last Jedi. | Image: Disney / Lucasfilm

Though we’re living in a golden age for Star Wars series, a new trio of big-screen projects are definitely underway that will each tell epic stories from different points in the franchise’s history.

At Star Wars Celebration Europe today, Kathleen Kennedy was joined by Daisy Ridley on stage as she announced that James Mangold, Dave Filoni, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy are all set to direct three upcoming Star Wars films due out in coming years. Though no titles or premiere dates were revealed, Kennedy shared that Mangold’s film will go “back to the dawn of the Jedi” while Filoni’s film, which focuses on the New Republic, will connect directly with streaming series like Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, and The Book of Boba Fett.

Perhaps most...

Continue reading…

Star Wars Celebration 2023: all the trailers and news

Image: Lucasfilm

This is the way (for the latest updates).

Continue reading…

Star Wars: Ahsoka starts streaming in August 2023

Image: Lucasfilm

There’s going to be more Star Wars this summer. Lucasfilm confirmed today that the next live-action spinoff to hit Disney Plus will be Ahsoka, which will start streaming on Disney Plus in August 2023. The announcement was made during a panel at Star Wars Celebration 2023. We also got a first look at the show via a teaser trailer.

Ahsoka the character made her first live-action appearance in season 2 of The Mandolorian, after originally being introduced in the animated shows. She’s played by Rosario Dawson who will be reprising her role for the new series. We already knew the show would debut this year, as it’s part of a pretty-packed slate for Disney Plus in 2023.

And, since this is Disney, Ahsoka is just one of many series in the works....

Continue reading…

Star Wars spinoff The Acolyte hits Disney Plus in 2024

Image: Lucasfilm

The next live-action Star Wars series is coming next year. While it doesn’t have a specific premiere date just yet, at the Star Wars Celebration event in London, Lucasfilm confirmed that The Acolyte will premiere on Disney Plus in 2024.

The Acolyte is a show focused on the dark side of the Force, with a cast led by Amandla Stenberg. It also features a handful of other big names like The Matrix star Carrie-Anne Moss and Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae. The rest of the cast includes Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Jodie Turner-Smith, Rebecca Henderson, Charlie Barnett, and Dean-Charles Chapman. Leslye Headland, the co-creator of Netflix’s Russian Doll, is serving as showrunner, director, and executive producer. The series was first announced in 2020.

...

Continue reading…

Samsung’s having a terrible financial year

Samsung's chip business is killing profits. | Photo by JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images

Samsung Electronics is having another bad quarter according to the company’s own preliminary estimates. This time, it’s warning that quarterly operating profit decreased 96 per cent compared to the same period last year, worse than the two-thirds plunge it suffered the three months prior. Not even robust sales of the new Galaxy S23 series could overcome a global plummet in chip demand.

Semiconductor demand has waned since peak covid as everyone splurged on lockdown toys and tools. Now the global economic slowdown has caused consumers to think twice about buying that next gadget resulting in swollen chip inventories for companies like Samsung. And according to my ECON101 professor, prices will fall when there’s more supply than demand...

Continue reading…

Google is rolling out WebGPU tech for next-gen gaming in your browser

Image: The Verge

Google has announced that WebGPU, an API that gives web apps more access to your graphics card’s capabilities, will be enabled by default in Chrome 113, which is due out in around three weeks. WebGPU will be available on Windows PCs that support Direct3D 12, macOS, and ChromeOS devices that support Vulkan.

According to a blog post, WebGPU can let developers achieve the same level of graphics they can now with far less code and provides “more than three times improvements in machine learning model inferences.” That last one is a real kicker — improved machine learning performance was interesting in 2021, when the feature was added to Chrome on an experimental basis, but now that we’re in the age of generative AIs and large language...

Continue reading…

Apple’s first retail store in India is opening soon

Photo by Wang Gang / VCG via Getty Images

Apple will be opening its first retail store in India in Mumbai, according to a short notice on the company’s website.

“Hello Mumbai,” the notice reads. “We are getting ready to welcome you aboard our first store in India. And raring to see where your creativity takes you at Apple BKC.” Apple’s website says the new store is “coming soon,” but the company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment for more details.

Image: Apple

Apple’s logo for its new store in Mumbai.

The store will be at the Jio World Drive mall and is reportedly 22,000 square feet. You can see a few exterior pictures of the new location in this Reuters article.

The Mumbai store in India isn’t a total surprise. CEO Tim Cook said in...

Continue reading…

Amazon is discounting Kindles, speakers, and more during its spring sales event

Amazon’s newest Echo Dot is just one of many devices available at an all-time low. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Spring has sprung, and to celebrate that fact, Amazon naturally decided to discount a bunch of random devices mostly unrelated to the season. That’s good news for us, though. Given Mother’s Day and graduation season are just around the corner, the ongoing sale makes for a nice opportunity to pick up some of Amazon’s most popular items at a fraction of their typical list price. The promo extends to top-of-the-line streaming sticks like the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, as well as the newest Echo Dot, the entry-level Kindle, and even Amazon’s Fire TV Omni QLED. Even better, retailers like Best Buy are matching Amazon’s prices.

Of course, as with any sale, not all the deals are that great, so we’ve gone ahead and vetted them to save you the...

Continue reading…

Twitter cuts off Substack embeds and starts suspending bots

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Writers trying to embed tweets in their Substack stories are in for a rude surprise: after pasting a link to the site, a message pops up saying that “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts” and explaining that the company is working on a fix. The unfortunate situation comes on the heels of Substack announcing Notes, a Twitter competitor.

The issue could cause problems for writers who want to talk about what’s going on with Twitter in their newsletters or about things that are happening on the platform. While screenshots of tweets could work in some cases, they’re less trustworthy because they don’t provide a direct link to the source. Screenshots also won’t help you if you’re trying to, say,...

Continue reading…

Walmart’s preparing to build its own coast-to-coast EV charging network

Image: Walmart

Walmart is planning to build out a nationwide electric vehicle charging network at thousands of its stores, including Sam’s Club locations. The company says it plans to have the network built by 2030 and will help make EV ownership “more accessible, reliable, convenient and affordable.”

“Currently, Walmart has nearly 1,300 third-party chargers across 280 stores in partnership with third-party suppliers,” Walmart’s director of global communications – sustainability, Aman Singh, writes in an email with The Verge. This newly announced expansion has the company building a nationwide EV fast charging network on its own instead.

Walmart believes it is “uniquely positioned” to build out a convenient charging solution for EV owners. The company...

Continue reading…

Why this new plant is capturing carbon dioxide just to let it back out again

Global Thermostat’s kiloton-scale unit for removing carbon dioxide from the air. | Image: Global Thermostat

There’s a scramble in the US to build the first generation of technologies to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And the first American company with this kind of system, Global Thermostat, just set up shop in Colorado to prove that its CO2-sucking technology actually works.

There’s been hype around Global Thermostat since it got started in 2010 as one of just three high-profilecompanies in the world developing this technology, called direct air capture (DAC). The idea is to filter CO2 out of the ambient air and then sell that CO2 as a product or sequester it underground to keep it from escaping into the atmosphere where it would heat up the planet.

But Global Thermostat has been roiled by years of delays and internal drama. Its...

Continue reading…

Here are the best Apple Watch deals right now

The Apple Watch Series 8 isn’t a massive step up from the prior model, but it does offer a few new features. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

In September, Apple launched its latest batch of smartwatches, introducing the first-ever Ultra ($799) alongside the Series 8 ($399) and a new Apple Watch SE ($249). Each wearable has its own pros and cons associated with it, but the introduction of the high-end Ultra also means there are now more Apple Watch models on the market before than ever before — and a lot more deals to be had.

But with all of those options, which one should you pick? Generally speaking, you want to buy the newest watch you can afford so that it continues to receive software updates from Apple. The latest update, watchOS 9, launched on the Apple Watch Series 4 and newer models in September, though no one can say with certainty whether the Series 4 will get the...

Continue reading…

Twitter’s API shutdown and botpocalypse begins

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

The age of Twitter bots may be over.

Continue reading…