There’s no perfect version of Persona 3 — but Reload is close

Image: Atlus

For such an influential game, Persona 3 has a bit of a complicated release history. It first launched on the PS2 in 2006 and ushered in a whole new era for the franchise, mashing together an RPG with a life sim, tasking players with balancing dungeon crawling with the day to day of a normal high school student. That release was followed by a special edition — called FES — which added an epilogue that spanned a hefty 30 hours. Then, the game was remade for the PSP with Persona 3 Portable, which last year was rereleased on PC and modern consoles.

While the base game is great, each version is slightly compromised. FES has the most complete story, but it’s missing the streamlined gameplay and option to play as a female character that are in P...

Continue reading…

Tesla’s latest screwup involves making the font size of its braking system too small

Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge

Tesla’s latest massive recall is a weird one. It’s not about reported problems with sudden braking or driver monitoring alerts or seat belts. Nope, this one is all about font size.

It turns out that the font size for Tesla’s brake warning system is a bit too small. How small? Smaller than 3.2 millimeters, or one-eighth of an inch, as prescribed by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). So the company has to recall all 2.19 million vehicles it has on the road today — again.

It may seem minor, but font size can correlate to safety when all your vehicle’s controls are ported through a touchscreen. According to the recall notice filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), visual warning indicators...

Continue reading…

Microsoft employees discover new Teams feature thanks to Pepe the Frog

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft has started internally testing a new custom emoji feature for its Microsoft Teams communications platform. Multiple sources tell The Verge that Microsoft employees learned about the surprise new capability after animated emoji of Pepe the Frog — a meme with a troubled past — started appearing in reactions and messages on early internal versions of Microsoft Teams.

The Pepe the Frog emotes, which are now widely used in Discord servers and on Amazon’s Twitch streaming platform as lighthearted responses, appeared alongside other custom emoji that don’t ship in Microsoft Teams right now. We’re told Microsoft is testing the custom emoji feature in early so-called “dogfood” versions of Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams currently...

Continue reading…

Adobe brings Lightroom and Firefly AI to the Apple Vision Pro

You can pull images generated by Firefly AI and place them around you like a floating gallery. | Image: Adobe

Adobe’s Firefly AI, the text-to-image tool behind features like Photoshop’s generative fill, will be available on the Apple Vision Pro as a native app, alongside the company’s popular Lightroom photo editing software already demonstrated during the headset’s announcement.

The creative software giant announced in a press release that the new Firefly experience had been “purpose-built” for the headset’s visionOS system, allowing users to move and place images generated by the app onto real-world spaces like walls and desks.

The interface of the Firefly visionOS app should be familiar to anyone who’s already used the web-based version of the tool — users just need to enter a text description within the prompt box at the bottom and hit...

Continue reading…

All I want is for the NJ Transit app to not suck

I don’t know why it has to be like this. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

Last month, I traded in my ludicrous New York City rent for a more affordable life in Hackensack, New Jersey. (Yes, it’s all my money got me.) Many of my friends who’d migrated to Jersey warned me about the NJ Transit app. It’s not good, they said. I didn’t take them too seriously. I was forged in the fires of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s continually broken website circa 2001. After a seven-year stint in Tokyo navigating the labyrinthian Tokyo subway and bus system, what public transit app could ever befuddle me?

Hubris is a bitch.

Upon opening the NJ Transit app, I was bombarded with more menus than I knew what to do with. Nothing is uniformly named. App navigation is a matryoshka doll of ill-organized tabs. Would you like to...

Continue reading…

The Sonos Arc is on sale for 20 percent off just in time for the Super Bowl

I can already hear the Swifties roaring. | Image: Chris Welch / The Verge

To the delight of Swifties and the chagrin of her detractors, the 2024 Super Bowl will feature the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers. We’re anticipating record-high camera cuts to the rich seats whenever Taylor Swift’s beau (Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce) makes a big play, so why not prepare with an equally big home theater upgrade?

Regardless of where you look, you’re bound to find a great TV deal leading up to the big game on February 11th, but Sonos is a good place to start if it’s booming audio you’re after. The company is running a promo through February 11th that saves you 20 percent on the Sonos Arc, bringing the soundbar down to $719 ($180 off) at Sonos, Best Buy, and B&H Photo for a limited time. The Arc offers a...

Continue reading…

Christian Selig makes the YouTube Vision Pro app that Google wouldn’t

YouTube, now on the Vision Pro. | Image: Christian Selig

Google said it isn’t putting out a YouTube app for Apple’s new Vision Pro headset, so a third-party developer has stepped in to make one instead. Juno is the work of Christian Selig, the developer behind the now defunct Reddit app Apollo. It costs $4.99 and is already available from Apple’s App Store.

Although it’s an unofficial third-party app, Juno supports most of the features you’d expect out of a native YouTube app. You can watch videos (obviously), scrub and skip through them using pinch gestures, and it’ll even respect the videos’ aspect ratios. Browsing YouTube’s catalog is also supported (though you can’t see video comments), and Juno is also set up to show YouTube ads to avoid making Google “grumpy,” Selig writes.

Juno...

Continue reading…

Google Search’s cache links are officially being retired

The discontinued cache button. | Image: Google

Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company’s search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Sullivan wrote on X. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

The cache feature historically let you view a webpage as Google sees it, which is useful for a variety of different reasons beyond just being able to see a page that’s struggling to load. SEO professionals could use it to debug their sites or even keep tabs on competitors, and it can also be an enormously helpful news gathering tool, giving reporters the ability to see exactly what information a company has...

Continue reading…

Meta says Apple has made it ‘very difficult’ to build rival app stores in the EU

Mark Zuckerberg. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Thanks to new regulations, Apple is technically enabling the creation of alternative iPhone app stores in the European Union. But that doesn’t mean large developers like Meta will bite.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his company’s view on Apple’s new policies during Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday:

“I don’t think that the Apple thing is going to have any difference for us. Because I think that the way they have implemented it, I would be very surprised if any developer chose to go into the alternative app stores that they have. They’ve made it so onerous, and I think so at odds with the intent of what the EU regulation was, that I think it’s just going to be very difficult for anyone, including ourselves, to really seriously...

Continue reading…

Halo’s Black History Month armor shaders are unintentionally hilarious

Image: 343 Industries

Black History Month is that special time when video game companies try to show consumers how inclusive they are with special Black / African themed in-game cosmetics and messages of appreciation for the three or four Black employees they keep on staff at any one time.

In Halo’s case, it’s offering players a special set of armor shaders in colors and patterns typically associated with African art and culture. As a concept, these shaders are totally fine. Individual cosmetics players can use to zhuzh up their armor; cool, I dig it. But the way 343 slapped all these individual pieces together, like a ridiculous Voltron of Blackness, is darkly hilarious in a way I don’t think the company intended.

“Divided, we are sand. United, we are a...

Continue reading…

Tim Cook confirms Apple’s generative AI features are coming ‘later this year’

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

During Apple’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday afternoon, CEO Tim Cook mentioned that the company is working on generative AI software features that will make their way to customers “later this year.” That aligns with reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who said recently that iOS 18 could be the “biggest” update in the operating system’s history. Cook’s teases — he mentioned generative AI several times, but never got specific — seem to confirm that we’re in for a big release this fall.

“As we look ahead, we will continue to invest in these and other technologies that will shape the future. That includes artificial intelligence, where we continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort, and we’re excited to share the...

Continue reading…

Toward a unified taxonomy of text-based social media use

Let’s check out the specimens! | photo by Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images

The most important thing to know about social media is this: Most people don’t post.

You know this. I know this. God knows this. I am going to limit my analysis to text-based sites because video sites such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are not my ministry. This analysis may transfer in whole or in part to those platforms, for all I know.

The silent majority of every successful text-based social media site is lurkers. These are sane, normal people with sane, normal lives. They are well-balanced and have hobbies. One of those hobbies is visiting social media sites, where they are usually looking for either information or entertainment. They’re the audience.

The development of trolls appears to be the internet’s version of...

Continue reading…

Hey Google, I was using that button!

Illustration: The Verge

Every time another Google app or feature bites the dust — even a small, relatively inconsequential one — I get annoyed. Really annoyed.

Here’s the thing: there are Google Assistant-equipped devices in three rooms of my relatively small house: living room, bedroom, and office. Which means, unfortunately, that when I say “Hey, Google” out loud to my phone, I am just as likely to get a reaction from one — or more — of those three devices. (Yes, I know that’s not supposed to happen and no, we haven’t been able to fix it yet.) And they sometimes offer different answers simultaneously, which makes things even more confusing.

This is what I got when I hit the mic icon in Search.

To avoid this unfortunate state of affairs,...

Continue reading…

Apple didn’t release new iPads last year, and now its sales are way down

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Tomorrow, Apple will launch its Vision Pro headset, marking the company’s most high-profile product launch since the original Apple Watch. And later this year, it will open up the iPhone’s App Store (at least in the EU) in new ways, offering developers more freedom — even if some of them are already displeased with the approach Apple is taking. There are enormous moments ahead for this company, and in the run-up to all of that, today Apple announced its Q1 2024 earnings. At least for now, the pivotal question surrounding Apple’s business remains the same as always: how’s the iPhone doing?

Pretty well, it turns out. This was the first full quarter of iPhone 15 sales, and Apple reported iPhone unit revenue of $69.7 billion. (Just a few...

Continue reading…

Here are the best Kindle deals right now

The Kindle Scribe is on sale as a part of a bundle.

When it comes to finding a device to use to read your ebooks, you have a few options to choose from. You can always buy a tablet or use your phone, but those devices are multipurpose and can be used for a ton of things, like surfing the web or doom-scrolling on Twitter. If you are looking for something to strictly read books, e-readers, while niche, are designed to store all of your books in a virtual library with limited functionality.

Amazon, one of the pioneers of the e-reader, has dominated the space for years with its ever-expanding Kindle lineup, which consists of several unique models with their own pros and cons. The bulk of the devices function as simple ebook readers; however, with the Kindle Scribe, Amazon looks to be moving...

Continue reading…

OpenAI says there’s only a small chance ChatGPT will help create bioweapons

Image: OpenAI

OpenAI’s GPT-4 only gave people a slight advantage over the regular internet when it came to researching bioweapons, according to a study the company conducted itself. Bloomberg reported that the research was carried out by the new preparedness team at OpenAI, which was launched last fall in order to assess the risks and potential misuses of the company’s frontier AI models.

OpenAI’s findings seem to counter concerns by scientists, lawmakers, and AI ethicists that powerful AI models like GPT-4 can be of significant help to terrorists, criminals, and other malicious actors. Multiple studies have cautioned that AI can give those creating bioweapons an extra edge, such as this one by the Effective Ventures Foundation at Oxford that looked...

Continue reading…

Amazon made an AI bot to talk you through buying more stuff on Amazon

Image: Amazon

Amazon has taken the wraps off of an AI shopping assistant, and it’s called Rufus — the same name as the company’s corgi mascot. The new chatbot is trained on Amazon’s product library and customer reviews, as well as information from the web, allowing it to answer questions about products, make comparisons, provide suggestions, and more.

Rufus is still in beta and will only appear for “select customers” before rolling out to more users in the coming weeks. If you have access to the beta, you can open up a chat with Rufus by launching Amazon’s mobile app and then typing or speaking questions into the search bar. A Rufus chat window will show up at the bottom of your screen, which you can expand to get an answer to your question, select...

Continue reading…

YouTube now has more than 100 million Premium subscribers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube reached an important milestone on Thursday for its paid music and video tiers, crossing the 100 million subscriber benchmark globally. That figure includes trial subscriptions, so the real number of paid subscribers is fewer. YouTube’s subscription tiers have been a primary revenue generator for Google’s subscriptions services, which hit $15 billion in revenue (including YouTube TV and Google One) in 2023. It’s been roughly nine years since YouTube launched a paid, ad-free subscription service; it later decided to divide YouTube Red into YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium.

YouTube Music is the company’s streaming music service; the ad-free Premium tier costs $10.99 per month. YouTube Premium, at $13.99 per month, includes...

Continue reading…

Chip race: Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia battle it out for AI chip supremacy

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tech companies want AI to grow. To do that, they need more and more powerful chips.

Continue reading…

Here are the best AirPods deals you can get right now

The third-gen AirPods are $149.99 ($30 off) at Costco for members. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

If you know where to look, there are often some great discounts available on Apple’s ever-popular AirPods. Since Apple launched the third-gen AirPods toward the end of 2021, we’ve seen the starting price of the second-gen, entry-level model slowly dip to around $100. And now that the second-gen AirPods Pro has been on the market for over a year, we’re also seeing their price fall more often, too. We’re even seeing great deals land on the newer updated AirPods Pro with USB-C.

Here, we’ve curated the best deals currently available on each model, including the entry-level AirPods, the AirPods Pro, the third-gen AirPods, and the AirPods Max.

The best AirPods (second-gen) deals

In 2021, Apple lowered the list price of the...

Continue reading…

Car-tech breakup fever is heating up

Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

It’s not you, it’s the interest rates.

The reasons are probably more nuanced than that, but a number of prominent car tech companies are finding themselves in the unenviable position of being dumped by the bigger companies that they’ve relied on for funding. It’s especially harsh when you consider we’re a few weeks away from Valentine’s Day.

It started earlier this week, when auto parts giant Aptiv said it was pulling funding from Motional, the robotaxi joint venture it started with Hyundai in 2020. The reason? Money, of course. And how long it was taking to commercialize the technology.

Aptiv said it was incurring millions of dollars in losses while waiting for Motional to launch its fully driverless ridehail vehicles. The company...

Continue reading…

Meta’s Quest headsets add spatial video and pinch controls to compete with Vision Pro

Image: Meta

The Meta Quest 3 will soon give wearers the ability to easily view spatial videos as well as use new pinching gestures for control, features that are similar to what you’ll find in Apple’s much more expensive Vision Pro headset that launches this week. Both changes are starting to roll out gradually as part of update v62, which should get to most owners of Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro headsets starting the week of February 7th.

The spatial video support will allow wearers to view 3D footage captured with Apple’s headset or an iPhone 15 Pro / Pro Max.

Image: Mark Zuckerberg (Instagram)

A short clip from Mark Zuckerberg’s “early look” at spatial video playback on a Quest 3.

Apple’s spatial 3D videos are...

Continue reading…

The Nintendo Switch has received a rare discount at Amazon

The standard Nintendo Switch can be played on the go or while docked on a TV. | Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

While the Nintendo Switch 2 is widely expected to drop this year, it’s anybody’s guess when. That means if you don’t want to wait to play games like the Mario vs. Donkey Kong demo and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the existing Switch lineup is still your best bet. Luckily, the Nintendo Switchconsole with neon blue and red Joy-Cons is on sale right now for just $269 when you check out at Amazon, which is a rare $30 discount given it typically goes for $299.99.

If you’re looking for a console you can take on the go or play docked on a TV, the Nintendo Switch remains an excellent option. True, the Switch 2 might come with a bigger eight-inch screen, but the 6.2-inch touchscreen found on the original Switch is still spacious...

Continue reading…

The Arc browser is getting better bookmarks and search results, all thanks to AI

Arc’s new Smart Folders start with an AI query. | Image: The Browser Company

Only a few days after releasing an AI-powered mobile app, called Arc Search, The Browser Company is making some big (and of course AI-powered) changes to its desktop browser as well.

Unlike Arc Search, though, which is essentially a total rethink of how you use the web on your phone, the new stuff in Arc for Mac and Windows is more straightforward and practical. They turn search queries into bookmarks without needing a Google page, and they keep you up to date on stuff you care about without needing another app. In Arc’s world, it’s all about the web browser.

For instance, the new “Instant Links” feature is a way to use AI to skip a search engine: if you’re looking for something specific, like that epic “Blank Space” performance from...

Continue reading…

Google Maps is getting ‘supercharged’ with generative AI

Image: Google

Google is bringing generative AI to — where else? — Google Maps, promising to help users find cool places through the use of large language models (LLM).

The feature will answer queries for restaurant or shopping recommendations, for example, using its LLM to “analyze Maps’ detailed information about more than 250 million places and trusted insights from our community of over 300 million contributors to quickly make suggestions for where to go.”

Google says the feature will first become available in the US, but there’s no word yet on when other countries will also get it.

It’s a natural place for Google to flex its AI muscles

It’s a natural place for Google to flex its AI muscles, as the company has been laboring for years to turn its...

Continue reading…

Snap is recalling and refunding every drone it ever sold

The Snap Pixy. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Snap gave up on its Pixy flying selfie camera drone after just four months, but it turns out the company sold under 71,000 drones — and now the company is recalling every one of those drones because their batteries pose a fire hazard. Yes, the entire drone is being recalled, not just the removable battery, likely because Snap doesn’t make those batteries anymore.

Snap and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission say you should “immediately stop using the Pixy Flying Camera, remove the battery and stop charging it” now that there have been four reports of the battery bulging, one fire, and one “minor injury.”

Then, you can get a full refund for the entire drone and / or any batteries you own — sounds like we’re talking at least $185...

Continue reading…

Anker’s workout-friendly Soundcore Sport X10 earbuds are a bargain at just $56

Anker’s Soundcore Sport X10 offers wraparound hooks and an IPX7 rating for water and sweat resistance for less than $60. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

If you’ve already broken your New Year’s health-related resolutions, today’s lead deal might get you back on track. Right now, Anker’s Soundcore Sport X10 — an excellent budget-friendly pair of workout earbuds —are on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and B&H Photo for $55.99 ($24 off). That’s just $5 shy of their all-time low price and the best price we’ve seen so far this year.

For a pair of earbuds that cost less than $60, the X10 offers a lot. Their flexible, wraparound hooks, for example, ensure they’ll stay comfortably in place even during the most vigorous workouts. At the same time, they can handle sweaty gym sessions and even runs on rainy days thanks to their IPX7 rating for water and sweat resistance. And, of course, they offer...

Continue reading…

Senators find tech CEOs’ responses hollow after four-hour hearing

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) speaks at a press conference following the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with five tech CEOs. | Lauren Feiner

During an unusually emotional hearing on Wednesday, senators spent hours trying to get a group of five tech CEOs to confront the harms their platforms have caused and submit to more checks on their power.

The Senate Judiciary Committee invited the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X, and Discord to face the families of children who’d died following cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, or other harmful events on their platforms. They asked why Section 230, the law that shields online platforms from being held liable for their users’ posts, should stop these families from facing them in court.

The CEOs expressed condolences for the families hurt on their services but reiterated the work and investment they’ve already made to keep users safe....

Continue reading…

Comcast is dropping its misleading Xfinity 10G network branding

Comcast can still use “10G” to describe products and services, so long as it’s being used accurately. | Image: Xfinity Creative

Comcast has agreed to abandon its “Xfinity 10G network” product branding after advertising watchdogs concluded that it could cause consumers to think they will all experience “significantly faster speeds than are available on 5G networks,” which isn’t true.

On Wednesday, the National Advertising Review Board (NARB) ruled that Comcast should discontinue the term “10G” both when describing the Xfinity network and within the name of its Xfinity 10G Network service itself. The decision stems from challenges raised by T-Mobile and AT&T that highlighted the confusing differences in the terminology being used by cellular networks, where the “G” in 5G stands for “generation,” and the 10G branding used by cable companies, which instead represents...

Continue reading…

The Verge’s 2024 Valentine’s Day gift guide

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images

We’re here to help you save time with an assortment of unique gifts that are sweeter than any candy bar.

Continue reading…