Meta is dropping the price of the Quest 2 back to $299.99

The Quest 2, originally released in 2020. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Starting June 4th, the 128GB version of the Quest 2 will cost $299.99 while the 256GB version will cost $349.99, Meta announced today. That’s a $100 price cut for the entry-level version and a $80 price cut for the step-up model. As well as cutting the price of the headset, Meta also says it’s working on a software update that will improve both CPU and GPU performance on the Quest 2, as well as the more recent Quest Pro.

News of the price cut comes roughly a year after Meta increased the price of both storage variants of the headset by $100, almost two years after its original release in 2020. It later cut the price of the 256GB version of the Quest 2 to $429.99. News of the price cut came on the same day that Meta announced the Quest...

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Meta announces its Quest 3 VR headset, which will cost $499.99

The Meta Quest 3. | Image: Meta

Meta has officially announced its Quest 3 VR headset in a post on Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram.

The headset is coming this fall with a 128GB version available for $499.99 plus “an additional storage option for those who want more space” at an unspecified price. Compared to its predecessor, the Quest 2, the Quest 3’s design is 40 percent lighter, while a new Snapdragon chip inside has twice the graphics performance.

Image: Meta

Quest 3 exploded view

It’s also compatible with the Quest 2’s games, which is good since the old headset is sticking around, but at a lower price. Meta said that starting June 4th, the Quest 2 will drop its price by $100 to $299.99 for the 128GB version, while the 256GB version is getting...

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Activision Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

Image: Getty Images

There is no war (harassment) at Ba Sing Se (Activision Blizzard).

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Google Wallet is getting custom cards and state IDs this month

Maryland is the first state to support the feature, with Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia to follow “in the coming months.” | Image: Google

Google Wallet users will soon be able to add their state ID or driver’s licenses to Google Wallet. Announced today, anyone with a Maryland ID or driver’s license can now save their ID card to the Google Wallet app on any phone running Android 8.0 or later that has device lock enabled. Google has been testing digital state ID cards for Wallet since December last year, and Maryland also happened to be one of the first states to bring the feature to Apple’s Wallet app for iPhones. The new support for Google Wallet will also be available to residents in Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia “in the coming months,” with additional states expected to follow.

“Google is working with many states and international partners on mobile devices,” said Dong...

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No Man’s Sky just launched on Mac with cross-play support

Image: Hello Games

No Man’s Sky is touching down on Macs starting today. Hello Games announced that the space adventure is available for Mac users on Steam now (it’ll be free if you already own the PC version), while the game will be coming to the Mac App Store “shortly.” The studio says the game will be “available on any Mac with Apple silicon” and will also be playable on “Intel-based Macs with a Core i5 processor.” The port will support both cross-save with PC and cross-play with players on PC, VR, and console (Switch not included).

Here’s how Hello describes the new version:

Expect fast loading times using the Mac internal SSD. Consistent performance across the full range of Macs is possible as we are one of the first titles to support MetalFX...

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Google’s latest feature drop makes Wear OS more useful and expands dark web reporting

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Google’s dark web reporting feature — a service that allows users to run one-off scans to see if their Gmail address has been exposed to the seedier corners of the internet — is now fully available on most Google accounts across the US. It’s one of just a handful of updates announced in Google’s latest Android feature drop, which is otherwise looking fairly sparse as we approach the public rollout of Android 14 later this year.

Dark web reports are free and can be run manually from the Google One website and app in the US. If you’re in the US, then just browse over to one.google.com, where you should see a “try now” option in the dark web scan section.

Image: Google

Google’s dark web report will check if your...

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Etrian Odyssey’s new remaster makes me miss the Nintendo DS even more

Image: Atlus

When Nintendo discontinued the 3DS — and with it, the existence of dual-screen handhelds — I lamented the weird games we would no longer have. High up on that list was Etrian Odyssey: a line of dungeon-crawling role-playing games built explicitly with the handheld’s two screens in mind. They’re games where you fight your way through dangerous labyrinths and literally draw your own map to chart your progress. I had a hard time imagining playing them on any other platform.

Now, thanks to a remastered collection of the first three games for the Switch and PC (called the Origins Collection), I don’t have to imagine. And in a number of ways, these new versions are great, with the same fantastic gameplay coupled with beautiful visuals and...

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Ford offering flexible EV leases to Uber drivers

Image: Ford

Ford is teaming up with Uber to offer flexible leases on electric vehicles to rideshare drivers.

Uber is under pressure from governments around the world to get more of its drivers into EVs to reduce tailpipe pollution and fight climate change. And Ford is eager to get more of its Mustang Mach-Es on the road as it pours billions of dollars into EV production while incurring huge losses.

Under the new Ford Drive program, Uber drivers would be able to lease a Mustang Mach-E for flexible terms, either one or four-months, depending on the location. And there are other benefits as well. According to Ford:

The vehicle is delivered to the driver within two weeks, and they use the Ford Drive app to manage payments and service. In each city,...

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Nothing Phone 2: a roundup of every tease about the upcoming phone

The rear of 2022’s Nothing Phone 1. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Our constantly updated list of all the teases Nothing has released about its second phone.

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Polestar’s latest software update adds YouTube, upgraded Apple CarPlay

Image: Polestar

Polestar’s latest software update includes YouTube so Polestar 2 owners can watch streaming video while charging their vehicles and an updated version of Apple CarPlay that includes the ability to project Apple Maps onto the instrument cluster.

That last facet is interesting because it seems to offer a preview of what Apple’s next-generation version of CarPlay, with its support for multiple displays across the dashboard, may end up looking like.

The software update, P2.9, is Polestar’s 15th over-the-air (OTA) upgrade since 2020. Automakers are increasingly relying on OTA updates to add infotainment controls, including streaming video, games, and other creature comforts for the era of connected cars.

Image: Polestar ...

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Honor Magic VS review: foldable perks, foldable quirks

Honor’s foldable is the Samsung Z Fold’s first real competitor outside of China. It’s a more affordable alternative, but its rough edges are grating.

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Leap Motion's gesture control quest continues with the Leap Motion Controller 2

Leap Motion controller

Ten years after debuting with a $79.99 Kinect-like control unit, the company now called Ultraleap is back with a sequel.

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It could get harder to use a Nest Hub for shopping lists soon

Google Assistant will no longer integrate third-party lists and reminder apps starting June 20th. | Image: The Verge

Google Assistant will lose the ability to integrate with third-party notes apps on June 20th, per an AnyList developer blog post announcing the change (via 9to5Google). AnyList says it’s talking to Google about the change and hopes it can re-add integration later but, for now, has nothing to announce.

The loss of third-party notes and list app support will come along with the deprecation of Google software support for third-party Google Assistant smart displays, which was discovered in April this year.

AnyList noted in its post that integration is still possible with Amazon Alexa and Siri. Right now, there are four options for notes app integrations in Google Assistant settings: Any.do, AnyList, Bring Shopping Lists, and Google Keep....

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Amazon’s Ring agrees to pay $5.8 million to settle FTC spying suit

Image: Ring

Amazon’s Ring unit has agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that its doorbells illegally spied on users.

The settlement addresses a lawsuit filed by the FTC Wednesday accusing Ring of unlawfully deceiving its customers over the privacy of their data and the videos collected by its products. According to the agency’s complaint, Ring failed to restrict employees and contractors from accessing customer videos and used them to train algorithms without user consent.

“Ring’s disregard for privacy and security exposed consumers to spying and harassment,” FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Samuel Levine said in a statement Wednesday. “The FTC’s order makes clear that putting profit over privacy...

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A developer says Reddit is charging him $20 million a year to keep his app working

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apollo, the popular Reddit app for iOS, could face millions of dollars in fees as a result of Reddit’s new paid API model. According to an update posted by developer Christian Selig, Reddit could charge Apollo roughly $20 million per year if it continues operating at its current scale.

Reddit announced changes to its API policy in April, which allows the platform to put limits on the number of API requests made by a third-party client like Apollo. But now, we have more details on what exactly this means: Selig says Reddit plans on charging about $12,000 per 50 million requests.

Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing. Bad news for third-party apps, their announced pricing is close to Twitter's pricing, and Apollo would...

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Apple might announce ‘several’ Macs at WWDC

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

Apple could have a pretty big Worldwide Developers Conference next week, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In addition to the rumored mixed reality headset and the usual updates to its operating systems, Gurman is expecting Apple to focus on “several” new Macs at the show, he said in a tweet.

Gurman has already reported that a MacBook Air with a larger 15-inch screen and M2 chip is in the works, and it seems possible that could be one of the stars of the WWDC show. Apple revealed the redesigned M2-equipped 13-inch Air at last year’s WWDC, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Apple would once again use the event to introduce a larger Air.

I’m expecting three major focus areas next week: 1) several new Macs, 2) the...

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Here’s how Instagram recommends the content you see

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Instagram users have long theorized about how “the algorithm” works to rank content on the platform and why some users’ posts seem less visible than others. Now, Instagram is opening up the hood on its recommendation system to explain why you see certain posts — at least partially.

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A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

In a blog post, the company breaks down its ranking system by where a user will encounter content: the main feed, Stories, the Explore page, and Reels. There are countless pieces of information companies like Instagram use to predict what users will want to see and interact with, and there’s not one singular, all-knowing algorithm that drives...

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Delta faces a class action lawsuit over its climate commitments

Photo by Camilo Freedman / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Delta Air Lines misled customers with its sustainability claims, a new class action lawsuit alleges. The suit was filed in California yesterday and seeks damages for any resident who’s been on a Delta flight since it made a big climate commitment back in 2020.

That year, the company made a $1 billion pledge to become carbon neutral. Instead of slashing its emissions entirely, the plan relied on carbon credits to offset the airline’s pollution. The credits are supposed to represent tons of carbon dioxide emissions either prevented or taken out of the atmosphere. But the math on carbon offsets hasn’t added up. Years of academic research and investigations have shown that carbon offsets often fail to represent real reductions in greenhouse...

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Ted Lasso’s third season was unfocused and unwieldy, but it stuck the landing

Image: Apple

The third — and presumably final — season of the Apple TV Plus series was stuck between a sitcom and prestige drama but still managed to end on a high note.

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How to watch the first ESA Mars Express ‘live’ stream

The ESA will be streaming images on YouTube from the Mars Express spacecraft on June 2nd, 2023. | Image: European Space Agency

On June 2nd, 2023, the European Space Agency will be livestreaming images from the Mars Express, a spacecraft that first launched twenty years ago, per the agency’s announcement on Wednesday. The stream will take place for one hour, beginning on June 2nd at 11:45AM ET and will show new images every 50 seconds as they come straight from the Express’ Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC).

The announcement points out that the images won’t be “live” per se, as it takes anywhere from three to 22 minutes for them to reach the Earth thanks to the famously slow speed of light. (That’s a joke — light is, to our knowledge, still the record holder for universal speed.)

The Mars Express has been through a lot while making key discoveries about our rusty...

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Asus swears that it has totally fixed the ROG Ally’s battery life

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

When Asus seeded the first units of its handheld ROG Ally gaming PC to reviewers back in May, it’s fair to say that the results were... not overwhelmingly positive. Some reviewers loved the product, while others were broadly unhappy. But across the gamut, there was one thing that pretty much everyone agreed on: the battery life sucked.

The Verge’s Sean Hollister saw a maximum of four hours from the device, whereas his ceiling on the competing Steam Deck (which has a battery of the same size) is closer to seven.

The criticisms rippled through the online sphere. Preorders were canceled left and right — around 10 percent of original buyers, by Asus global marketing director Galip Fu’s recollection, backed out soon after the initial wave of...

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The Roll iOS app uses AI to simulate crane and dolly shots on iPhone footage

Roll can simulate camera effects on stationary iPhone footage that typically require fancy camera equipment like a dolly or crane. | Image: Roll

Roll AI is a new video creation and collaboration platform for iOS and web that allows users to add simulated video effects to iPhone footage that would typically require professional camera equipment to achieve, such as stabilized pan or crane shots. It’s one of the latest examples in a boom of new apps and services that utilize AI to simplify technical creative processes like photo and video editing.

Roll AI uses its proprietary generative AI models to recreate the filming environment in iPhone footage as a 3D space, allowing users to add text overlay effects and simulate side-panning, dolly, and crane camera movements in postproduction and apply various studio effects like bokeh (background blur). The service also uses AI to...

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Escape Academy’s newest DLC arrives in June

Image: Coin Crew Games

Escape Academy was one of my favorite games from last year. I loved the challenging, escape room-style puzzles that gave my brain a good, hearty scratching, and my only real complaint was that it was over too soon. With no more puzzles to solve, I stepped away from the game. But now, to my delight, Escape Academy is getting its second DLC, Escape From the Past, on June 19th.

I know most folks don’t play puzzle games for the story (the possible exception being the fantastic Professor Layton games), but the premise for Escape From the Past is actually compelling. You’re transported to the Escape Academy sometime in its past to solve puzzles with younger versions of characters from the base game who are still seriously attractive.

One of...

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Apple’s newest iPad Mini drops to its all-time low price

The latest Mini is the smallest model in Apple’s lineup, making it particularly ideal for reading. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Let’s face it: many of us have considered opting for the 10th-gen iPad because it’s one of the more affordable options in Apple’s current lineup. But today’s deal on its midrange sibling changes things. Right now, you can buy Apple’s latest iPad Miniwith Wi-Fi and 64GB of storage at its all-time low of $399.99 ($100 off) at Amazon and Best Buy — which is even less than the price of the latest iPad.

Unlike the 10th-gen iPad, the iPad Mini is compatible with the second-gen Apple Pencil. It’s also lighter, with a smaller 8.3-inch screen that’s easier to hold with one hand, which makes it particularly ideal for reading. At the same time, it comes equipped with a faster A15 Bionic chip while sharing some of the same features, including a...

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US to require all new vehicles to have robust automatic emergency braking

Photo by Gary Hershorn / Getty Images

All new vehicles will be required to have a “more effective” version of automatic emergency braking (AEB) under a new rule proposed today by the US Department of Transportation.

Around 90 percent of light-duty vehicles on the road today come standard with AEB. But the Department of Transportation is proposing a rule that would require automakers to adopt a more robust version of the technology that can stop vehicles traveling at higher speeds and detect vulnerable road users, like cyclists and pedestrians, even at night.

“AEB systems are a big step forward for saving lives on our roadways and preventing crashes,” US DOT Deputy Secretary Polly Trottenberg said at a press conference Wednesday. “When deployed, AEB systems can potentially...

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Hot foldable summer is here, and there are good reasons to get excited

Google’s Pixel Fold is one of the most highly anticipated folding phones of the past couple of years, and it debuts this summer. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Maybe you spotted one at the coffee shop, sitting conspicuously on a table in an L-shape position. Maybe you’ve seen one on the subway, in tablet mode, held by someone who’s trying very hard not to drop their $1800 gadget. They’re out there in the wild, but foldable phones are still a rare sighting. That might be about to change because we are entering — and I’m making an official call on this — hot foldable summer.

They’ve been on the market for years, but there are tons of good reasons why foldables haven’t caught on in the mainstream, starting with the fact that they’re expensive as all get-out. There were also some real bad problems with durability early on, and although build quality is much better now, there’s still a question...

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The unsung hero of the Apple Watch is its hidden buttons

The buttons on its underside are the key to the Apple Watch’s “strap monster” status. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Changing watch straps isn’t new, but Apple’s hidden little buttons simplified it and took it mainstream.

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The iPhone is dead — long live the iPhone

Many have predicted the death of the iPhone. We’ve been at Peak iPhone a bunch of different times. We’ve seen “stagnant growth,” “looming trouble,” and prognostications that other companies would steal Apple’s market share or that wearables or hearables or AR or VR or XR or SomethingElseR would usurp the smartphone. And yet, the iPhone remains what it has been for a decade and a half: the most successful product in consumer electronics, a $51 billion business in the first three months of this year alone.

A more fair thing to say might be that the iPhone is complete. That’s what we get into in this Status Update. It’s not dead, it’s not dying, but maybe it’s a product on which there is not much more work to do. It’s true of smartphones in...

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Amazon Echo Pop review: more style, less substance

As the latest entry-level Alexa smart speaker, the $40 Echo Pop packs a lot of value into a small package. It’s not as good as the Echo Dot, but it’s got looks on its side.

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The wild, true story of Chicago’s most infamous police impersonator

As a teenager, Vincent Richardson became a Chicago legend after successfully impersonating a police officer. He got caught — so why did he do it over and over? Well, when you’re really good at something...

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