How to find your 2023 Spotify Wrapped

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

One of the more popular end-of-year items is Spotify Wrapped, where the music service puts together a roundup of everything you listened to that year in various statistical formats, wrapped up (well, that’s what it’s called, right?) in bright, fun graphics. You can see what music categories you followed, get a playlist of your top 100 songs, see where you stand compared to others, and find out what your listening personality is.

It’s easy to find Spotify Wrapped — and this year, you can do it using the mobile app or on the web.

The simplest way is to just open your Spotify mobile app. If you don’t immediately see a banner labeled “your 2023 Wrapped,” then just look at the top menu — if you scroll left, you should find a Wrapped button...

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The Pokémon Horizons English dub finally hits Netflix in February

It’s been about a year since Ash Ketchum finally did the thing, and the mainline Pokémon anime sent him on his merry way to make room for two new young protagonists to take over the long-running series. Though Pokémon Horizons has already been airing in Japan for a while now, it hasn’t been clear when the show’s English dub would debut, but it seems as if the wait won’t be all that much longer.

Just in time for Pokémon Day 2024 (which is on February 27th), Pokémon Horizons will hit Netflix just a few days earlier on February 23rd to introduce English-speaking audiences to Liko (Alejandra Reynoso), Sprigatito (Kira Buckland), Roy (Anjali Kunapaneni), and Fuecoco (Zeno Robinson) as they embark on an adventure spanning multiple regions...

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GM wants you to know that it’s also unhappy with the slow pace of its EV business

Image: Getty

General Motors is dealing with a lot right now: a slowing EV business, delays in battery manufacturing, a safety crisis with its robotaxi unit, Cruise, and financial headwinds from the monthslong autoworker strike. On top of it all, its stock price is still struggling to get back to where it was this summer before the strike started.

With all that in mind, GM CEO Mary Barra hopped on a call with investors early Wednesday to address these compounding challenges and assure them that they have a number of fixes in mind. Costs will be reined in, factories will be delayed, and stock buybacks will recirculate cash to shareholders. It’s a crucial moment for GM, which is locked in a tight race with Ford, Tesla, and others to develop EVs and...

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Spotify Wrapped 2023 is so popular, it’s crashing

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Spotify Wrapped, the yearly roundup that offers insight into your listening habits, started having issues shortly after its launch. While Spotify is offering Wrapped on the web for the first time, the experience isn’t loading for some users.

Instead of landing on a login page when heading to Spotify.com/wrapped, some users (including myself and several others at The Verge) are seeing a blank webpage that says “500 Internal Server Error.” There are also numerous reports on X (formerly Twitter) with users reporting the same issue on both the desktop and mobile versions of the Spotify Wrapped webpage.

Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge

This is what some users see when visiting Spotify.com/wrapped.

However, the...

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DoorDash and Best Buy team up for on-demand tech deliveries

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

DoorDash is partnering with Best Buy to offer customers on-demand delivery for tech products like headphones, game controllers, tablets, and more. Going live today, users can find Best Buy in the DoorDash marketplace, alongside other non-restaurant businesses like Lush, Victoria’s Secret, and Party City.

Best Buy, which already has a similar arrangement with Instacart, is the “first national consumer electronics retailer” to join DoorDash, which is particularly notable after the delivery service’s arrangement with Walmart ended last year.

Although many holiday shoppers choose Amazon as their main destination, DoorDash could get products to your door in “under an hour, on average” by picking up from any one of Best Buy’s 900 stores in...

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HTC’s Vive Ultimate Trackers are a sleeker way to keep tabs on your VR limbs and other objects

HTC’s Vive Ultimate Tracker is a new VR peripheral that’s designed to track body parts like your feet or any other object you want to strap it to, the company has announced. First teased at GDC earlier this year, the Vive Ultimate Tracker is now available to buy starting at $199.

Although HTC has been producing VR trackers for years to work alongside its headsets, the Vive Ultimate Tracker is its first to support inside-out tracking, meaning it works without the need for the cumbersome external base stations used with older headsets. That means the Vive Ultimate Tracker can work seamlessly with all-in-one headsets like the Vive XR Elite or Vive Focus 3, with no additional sensors required. The tracker connects to the XR Elite and Focus 3...

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The Cybertruck made a mark but missed its moment

The Verge / Photo by Bloomberg, Getty Images

The long-delayed electric truck has finally arrived — sort of. Ten trucks are slated for delivery, but Tesla’s problems extend far beyond this first batch.

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Spotify Wrapped 2023 assigns you a ‘sound town’ based on your music taste

Image: Spotify

This year’s Spotify Wrapped roundup is live. As was the case with previous years, it features a bundle of shareable stats that break down the most-listened artists, songs, and podcasts for 574 million users. But there are also some surprises, too, including a new system that assigns you a city based on your listening habits.

Although Spotify Wrapped largely features the same basic listening stats every year, it seems to always find fun new ways to serve them up. That element of fun is still missing from the competition like Apple Music Replay, which remains largely unchanged from last year, or YouTube Music’s seasonal / annual Recap breakdowns.

Image: Spotify

Here are some of the characters you might get assigned...

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Robert De Niro accuses Apple of censoring awards speech

Robert De Niro, appearing onstage at the 2023 Gotham Awards in New York. | Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Gotham Film & Media Institute

Robert De Niro slammed Apple and the Gotham Film & Media Institute this week after claiming his speech for the Gotham Awards had been censored — allegedly by an Apple employee just minutes before the show started, according to Variety’s sources — to remove criticisms about Donald Trump and the entertainment industry.

The actor appeared onstage at the ceremony on Monday night for the presentation of the Gotham Historical Icon and Creator Tribute to Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, a film distributed by Apple that focuses on a series of murders targeting the Osage people in Oklahoma during the 1920s after oil was discovered on tribal land.

At first, De Niro said there was a mistake on the teleprompter, before realizing that...

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Google beefs up Drive’s document scanning feature and brings it to iPhone

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google Drive users on iOS are getting a new scanning feature that lets them quickly photograph documents and add them to their libraries, the search giant has announced. The feature has been available for Android for over a decade, but until now iPhone and iPad users haven’t had the same option. Google has also upgraded the scanner in Drive’s Android app.

iPhone users in the US will also benefit from a new title suggestion feature that attempts to auto-generate a document title based on text it recognizes in the scan. The feature previously came to the Android version of Drive earlier this year. Google also says it’s improving document scanning on Android, adding similar features like the option to automatically capture documents when...

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London’s famed black cabs will be listed on Uber’s app in big win for the ridehail company

Photo by Mike Kemp / In Pictures via Getty Images

Uber notched another win in its effort to win over the beleaguered taxi industry, announcing a plan to start listing London’s famed black cabbies in its app.

The service won’t roll out until early 2024, but some London cabbies have already begun to sign up. Uber says all 15,000 of London’s cab drivers “will now have the opportunity” to sign up for Uber trip referrals. The company recently brokered deals with taxi fleet owners in New York City, Paris, Rome, and Los Angeles to list drivers in its app.

Next to New York’s yellow cabs, the black cabbies of London are arguably the most iconic taxis in the world. Not only is this a symbolic victory for Uber but also it could help build trust with taxi owners who may still be wary of Uber’s...

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Amazon’s Q AI assistant lets users ask questions about their company’s data

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky | Noah Berger

Amazon’s cloud business AWS launched a chat tool called Amazon Q, where businesses can ask questions specific to their companies.

Announced during a keynote speech by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Q acts like an AI assistant where users can ask questions about their businesses using their data. For example, employees can query Amazon Q on the company’s latest guidelines for logo usage or understand another engineer’s code to maintain an app. Q can surface the information instead of the employee sifting through dozens of documents.

Users can access Amazon Q through the AWS Management Console or individual companies’ documentation pages, developer environments like Slack, and other third-party apps.

Selipsky noted that...

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Dragon’s Dogma 2 gets a March release date and tricky new class

Image: Capcom

A few weeks ago, Capcom announced that it would put on a showcase for Dragon’s Dogma 2. The livestream just wrapped up, showing off roughly 15 minutes of new gameplay, information, a trailer, and a release date: March 22nd. Check out the video here.

The release date wasn’t exactly the newest of news. Hours before the livestream began on November 28th, the game’s Steam page accidentally leaked that you’d be able to dogma your dragons on March 21st. The livestream confirmed that the actual release date is a day later, with Dragon’s Dogma 2 sharing a release date with one of my most anticipated games of 2024, Princess Peach: Showtime! (Interestingly, Steam has not yet updated the page which still shows March 21st.)

The showcase debuted a...

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This Macintosh-inspired mini PC is short on power but long on good looks

It’s a Macintosh! Only smaller! And made by Ayaneo! | Image: Ayaneo

Ayaneo, which is mostly known for making handheld gaming consoles, just fully revealed the new Retro Mini PC AM01 after teasing it a few weeks ago. It says it plans to ship the AM01 before the end of the year — and I’d be lying if I said I’m not tempted to get one. The AM01 won’t win any benchmarking contests, but it’ll almost certainly be the best-looking computer you own.

Let’s just state the obvious here: Ayaneo says it’s “paying homage” to the Macintosh, which is a kind way of saying, “We copied the thing pretty much exactly.” This device is the spitting image of Apple’s ’80s-era computer, right down to the floppy drive and the rainbow sticker. (Ayaneo made the sticker a flag shape instead of an apple, though — there’s paying homage...

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Amazon’s new Echo Frames are lighter, louder, and start shipping next week

Image: Amazon

Amazon’s Echo Frames strategy is to skip the visual augmented reality features of other “smart glasses” and deliver regular-looking glasses with the Alexa voice assistant built in. If this sounds like a valuable addition to your life, you’re in luck, as the new third-generation Echo Frames are now available to preorder on Amazon, and there’s a $75 discount available.

What The Verge’s David Pierce pointed out from his preview earlier this fall is that the biggest differences in the new Frames are as much about form as function — this latest iteration is a lighter, better-balanced version than its previous counterparts, with more stylish and colorful options available. Given that the only option in the first generation of the Echo Frames...

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AWS re:Invent 2023: the biggest news and announcements

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon has shared some new AI-focused offerings at its annual AWS conference.

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Walmart’s cheap Google TV box now comes in a stick

Walmart’s new Google TV stick has a remote with Google Assistant for voice control. | Image: Walmart

Following the launch of its Onn Google TV 4K Streaming Box earlier this year, Walmart is back with a cheaper stick version for just $14.88. The Onn Google TV Full HD Streaming Device (catchy) has lower video quality (1080p) and less RAM than its boxy sibling, but as it costs less than a month of Netflix, it could be a good option for smartening up the guest room TV.

Essentially a cheaper version of Google’s $30 Chromecast with Google TV HD (which is currently on sale for $19), the Onn stick runs the same Google TV software and comes with a voice-capable Bluetooth remote control that summons Google Assistant. It’s available starting today at Walmart.com.

Just plug the HDMI device into the back of your TV and access streaming services...

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Google’s .meme domain is here to serve your wackiest websites

Illustration: The Verge

If you ever wanted to make your website sound a little more silly, now’s your chance. Google Registry just released a new top-level domain that lets you slap a big ol’ .meme at the end of your website.

The new .meme domains are available to register right now as part of an early access period for an “additional one-time fee.” If you don’t want to pay extra, you can wait until they become publicly available on December 5th at 4PM UTC (12PM ET) to pay just the base annual price.

There are already a handful of sites that are embracing the .meme domain, some of which are dedicated to memes from the days of yore, including grumpycat.meme, nyancat.meme, and keyboardcat.meme. The meme tracker knowyour.meme even adopted the new domain. However,...

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Looney Tunes won’t be yanked from Max after all

Image: Warner Bros. Animation

It turns out that Warner Bros. Discovery actually won’t be pulling Looney Tunes from Max.

On Monday, in a 4:02PM ET email with the subject line “What’s New on Max This December,” Warner Bros. Discovery listed Looney Tunes and The Looney Tunes Show among the titles leaving Max on December 31st. Even though Looney Tunes is a signature Warner Bros. franchise, removing episodes of the cartoon wouldn’t be unprecedented; Warner Bros. Discovery pulled seasons 16-31 of the show from HBO Max at the end of last year. The company also recently shelved the nearly finished Coyote vs. Acme film, though that movie is now reportedly being shopped around.

But a few hours later, the company announced that Looney Tunes’ inclusion on the list of Max...

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This dev conference organizer seems addicted to making up women

Sizovs is also believed to be running (or at least influencing) the popular Coding Unicorn tech influencer across social media. | Image: The Verge

Something seems to be amiss with the diverse speaker list of the Devternity and JDKon developer conferences. The women, some of whom allegedly work for the parent company of both conferences, Dev.events, do not appear to exist. Devternity founder Eduards Sizovs has come under fire for creating fake women guest speakers for the events — and possibly creating a popular “tech influencer” that’s amassed over 115,000 real-world followers on Instagram.

As first noted by 404 Media, on November 24th, engineer Gergely Orosz claimed that several women listed to appear as Devternity speakers — including Coinbase staff engineer Anna Boyko and Coinbase “software craftswoman” Natalie Stadler — didn’t actually exist and were made up by the event...

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Apple Music Replay is back — and it’s still mostly a web experience

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple Music Replay has arrived. The year-end summary of your most-listened-to songs, artists, albums, and more is now available from Apple Music’s webpage — just days before Spotify is expected to drop its Wrapped stats.

While Apple launched Replay in 2019, it gave the feature a major update last year that makes it a lot more like Spotify Wrapped. But unlike Wrapped, which offers a set of super shareable charts, the stats presented in Apple Music Replay just aren’t as attractive to post online, and they’re not directly available within the Apple Music app. You can still get your 2023 Replay playlist in the Apple Music app, though.

Image: Apple

Like last year, Apple Music Replay will show a fun highlight reel of all...

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American Airlines will pay to bury 10,000 tons of CO2 underground

Airplanes at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Arlington, Virginia, on Tuesday, November 21st, 2023. | Image: Haiyun Jiang / Bloomberg via Getty Images

American Airlines signed a deal to trap 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide underground. It’s part of the airline’s plans to limit the pollution causing climate change, and it marks the first major deal for the Bill Gates-backed startup Graphyte that’s developing cutting-edge technology to tackle the problem.

Similar startups are selling services to big brands that want to draw down some of the planet-heating emissions they release into the atmosphere. They’re developing technology that filters CO2 out of the air or seawater — equipment that’s so expensive that it hasn’t been able to scale enough to make a meaningful dent in carbon emissions.

It marks the first major deal for the Bill Gates-backed startup Graphyte that’s developing...

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How to find your Apple Music Replay

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

I am a devoted Apple Music user, and you will pry the service out of my cold, dead hands. Still, I’ve spent the past few Decembers incredibly jealous of the sea of Spotify rewinds that populated my friends’ social media profiles.

Sure, Apple has always had ways to see your most-played songs over given periods of time. But it hasn’t had anything nearly as comprehensive or interesting as what Spotify puts out — at least, until this year.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Replay, Apple Music’s answer to Spotify Wrapped, is quite the same as its time-honored competitor. Still, it shows you the basics — your top artists, your top songs, stuff like that.

Here’s how to get it up and running.

How to look up your Apple Music Replay

You can...

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Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami on why the web isn’t dying after all

Photo illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge

The co-founder of website builder Wix is embracing generative AI, and he’s not too worried that it might destroy the business models of the web.

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How humans are engineering the future of coral reefs

Alex Parkin

How do you bring back a vanishing coral reef? That’s what conservationists are racing to do in the Florida Keys, where they’re coming up with a whole new playbook for saving corals.

Over the summer, they did what used to be the unthinkable: they took thousands of corals out of the sea to save them from a killer ocean heatwave. Hot tub-like temperatures might have wiped them out otherwise. Now, what’s next?

The Verge visited the evacuated corals where they found temporary refuge on land. We spent time at a gene bank, home to a new generation of baby corals that could one day repopulate Florida’s reefs. And we learned how to map restoration efforts out in the open ocean.

It’s all part of a massive effort to safeguard a future for coral...

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UK watchdog slams the brakes on Adobe’s $20 billion bid for Figma

Adobe and Figma have until December 19th to respond with potential remedies. | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Adobe’s conquest of the creative software industry appears to be facing some difficulties following an in-depth investigation by the UK’s competition watchdog. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally determined that Adobe’s proposed $20 billion bid for the cloud-based product design platform Figma would harm the product design software market and has effectively blocked the deal until competitive concerns are addressed.

The CMA announced its findings on Tuesday, saying that if the deal goes ahead in its current form, it would eliminate competition in the software markets for product design, image editing, and illustration. Figma is considered to be one of Adobe’s biggest competitors in the design software market,...

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The best Cyber Monday deals you can still get

Illustration by Aaron Fernandez for The Verge

Leftovers often get a bad rap, but this small buffet of lingering Cyber Monday deals is just as appetizing as when the deals were fresh.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday brought deep discounts across a manner of tech devices, from phones and wearables to video games and headphones. Thankfully, if you haven’t already pounced on a deal, you may still be in luck. While many quietly expired in the middle of the night at Cyber Monday’s conclusion, a bunch are soldiering on.

For example, you can still pick up the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds, the Xbox Series X bundled with Diablo IV, the Belkin BoostCharge Pro with MagSafe charger, and the new iRobot Roomba j9 at exceptional discounts. So be sure to take one last look around at what Cyber...

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Google’s new geothermal energy project is up and running

Google partnered with clean energy startup Fervo on a new geothermal project in Nevada that will send electricity to the grid that serves two of Google’s data centers. | Image: Google

A first-of-its-kind geothermal project is now up and running in Nevada, where it will help power Google’s data centers with clean energy.

Google is partnering with startup Fervo, which has developed new technology for harnessing geothermal power. Since they’re using different tactics than traditional geothermal plants, it is a relatively small project with the capacity to generate 3.5 MW. For context, one megawatt is enough to meet the demand of roughly 750 homes. The project will feed electricity into the local grid that serves two of Google’s data centers outside of Las Vegas and Reno.

It’s part of Google’s plan to run on carbon pollution-free electricity around the clock by 2030. To reach that goal, it’ll have to get more sources of...

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Ikea debuts a trio of affordable smart home sensors

(Left) Badring water leak sensor; (Right) the Parasoll door and window sensor pair. | Image: Ikea

Ikea’s push to democratize the smart home continues with the introduction of three new Zigbee sensors that won’t break the bank. There’s Parasoll, the door and window sensor; Vallhorn, the motion sensor; and Badring, the water leakage sensor. They’ll all be priced less than $10 when they go on sale globally in the first half of next year.

Parasoll is a typical window and door sensor that can be discretely mounted to trigger an automation when an open / close event is detected. It can also be paired directly with an Ikea light bulb right out of the box without needing to buy and configure an Ikea Home smart hub. It’s priced at €9.99 in Europe, but exact US pricing is yet to be confirmed for it or any of Ikea’s three new sensors.

...

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Reminder: Google is about to start purging inactive accounts

Illustration: The Verge

If you’ve got an old Google account that you want to keep but haven’t used in the past couple of years, you’ll want to sign into it soon to prevent its deletion under Google’s inactive account policy. The new rules were announced in May, when Google said that the earliest it would begin deleting accounts was in December 2023. Google has since started emailing affected users saying accounts will be eligible for deletion from December 1st.

To be clear, Google hasn’t said it would delete every eligible account starting on Friday. The company says it plans to take a phased approach, “starting with accounts that were created and never used again.” But now seems like as good a time as any to make sure your old accounts are in order so you...

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