The Polestar 3 isn’t out yet, and it’s already getting a big price cut

Image: Polestar

Polestar released new pricing details for its upcoming midsize electric three-row SUV: the Polestar 3. And most notably — and perhaps a reflection of the slowdown in EV sales growth over the past few months — the Polestar 3 will start at a price that’s significantly less than the company originally predicted.

Polestar, which was backed by Volvo but is now overseen by Volvo’s Chinese parent company, Geely, first announced the 3 back in October 2022. At the time, the company said the high-tech SUV would start at $83,900, placing it squarely in the luxury segment of vehicles.

But now, Polestar says the price for a Polestar 3 Long Range with all-wheel drive will start at $73,400. With the $1,400 destination charge, that increases to...

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Dyson’s 360 Vis Nav is a powerful robovac, but it’s the brush that tickles me the most

The Dyson 360 Vis Naz, the British manufacturer’s new robot vacuum, has finally landed in the States. I just got my hands on the $1,199 machine ahead of its official launch on March 19th and have some early thoughts to share.

As only Dyson’s second attempt to enter the US robot vacuum market — the first being way back in 2016 — the Vis Nav has a lot riding on its giant wheels. With a whopping 65 air watts of suction, Dyson says it’s the most powerful robot vacuum you can buy. Combined with a largely unique design, and a really big, fluffy brush, there’s a lot to like here.

A complete redesign of Dyson’s 360 Eye, which was only briefly sold in the US, the Vis Nav is slimmer, shorter, and wider than its predecessor. The new design...

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Spotify now has music videos

Videos can be accessed via a “Switch to Video” button on supported tracks. | Image: Spotify

Spotify is officially adding support for music videos, the company announced today. The audio streaming service describes the feature as a “beta” with only a “limited catalog” available as of today in 11 markets. Supported artists include Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, Ice Spice, Aluna, and Asake, with Spotify’s global head of consumer experience Sten Garmark telling TechCrunch that Spotify’s full music video catalog will eventually include “thousands” of songs.

The music video feature is accessible via the Now Playing screen on supported tracks, where a “Switch to Video” icon will appear above the song title. Tapping it will restart the song, and start playing its music video in the center of the display. You can rotate an iOS or Android device...

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Sony’s new PS5 update includes improved DualSense audio and screen sharing

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Sony is rolling out a new PS5 update that improves the speakers and microphone on DualSense controllers, adds pointers and emoji reactions to the Screen Share feature, and includes the ability to adjust the brightness of your PS5 power indicator. The update was first made available to testers last month and is rolling out globally to all PS5 owners today.

Sony is updating the firmware on the DualSense and DualSense Edge wireless controllers as part of this update to improve the output volume of in-game sounds and voice chat. The microphones on both controllers have also been improved thanks to a new machine learning model that cancels out background noise like button presses.

Image: Sony

The new emoji reactions...

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Perplexity brings Yelp data to its chatbot

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas tells The Verge that many people are using chatbots like regular search engines. It makes sense to offer information on things they look for, like restaurants, directly from the source. So it’s integrating Yelp’s maps, reviews, and other details in responses when people ask for restaurant recommendations.

“Our underlying motivation is that we started off as this tool that appealed to people doing fact checks and research. But research can be on anything, like what if you’re a coffee addict, you’d want to know where the good coffee shops are,” says Srinivas.

As The Verge’s David Pierce recently pointed out, how Perplexity mixes text and links when answering questions was already a selling point compared to...

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Radio is seeing red

Image: The Verge

This is Hot Pod_,_ The Verge_’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up_ here for more.

Hello! It’s been a bit since we checked in on the news. Today, I’ve got a look at the ongoing financial troubles at NPR member stations, the shutdown of Rooster Teeth, and the new season of Serial.

Woes mounting at NPR member stations: “Sponsorship dollars won’t return to previous levels.”

Two more public radio stations are discussing how they plan to get out of the red: Colorado Public Radio, which is adopting the “broadcast-to-podcast” strategy, and WBUR in Boston, which is appealing to listeners for donations before taking any next steps.

Colorado Public Radio laid off 15 members of its staff last week and closed its...

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Bluesky starts letting users pick their own moderation filters

Image: Bluesky

Bluesky will soon let users customize how content is moderated in their feeds. The social platform announced that it’s open-sourcing its moderation tool, called Ozone, to let developers create additional moderation services that can be selected by users.

Bluesky already has a team dedicated to content moderation, along with its own set of rules users have to follow. However, the new system will let users expand what’s moderated to their liking, allowing them to subscribe to additional moderation services that label, annotate, or hide certain types of posts.

Image: Bluesky

Here’s what it will look like to subscribe to a moderation service.

As an example, Bluesky says someone could use Ozone to create a...

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X-Men ’97 creator reportedly fired by Marvel weeks before premiere

Courtesy of Marvel Animation

Marvel Studios has fired Beau DeMayo, the creator of the upcoming animated Disney Plus series X-Men ’97, according to The Hollywood Reporter. De Mayo previously produced and wrote for another Marvel show, Moon Knight,and has also worked on The Witcher, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf,and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The firing reportedly occurred early last week, and neither Marvel nor DeMayo’s representatives commented on the decision to the outlet. Marvel has also not responded to The Verge’s request for comment.

The timing of DeMayo’s departure is unusual, given that X-Men ’97 is set to premiere on Disney Plus roughly a week from now, on March 20th. DeMayo is credited as the creator and executive producer of the show’s entire...

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The AI-generated hell of the 2024 election

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images, Nathan Howard

Media manipulation meets technological innovation.

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DHS wants $101 million to upgrade its border surveillance towers

If the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gets its way, Congress will grant it more than $107 billion to run its enforcement regime during the 2025 fiscal year. Buried in the lengthy budget request is $101 million to upgrade and maintain the network of surveillance towers scattered throughout the borderlands, first noted by The Intercept. According to its own official publications, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) hopes to fully integrate these systems through AI.

Politicians from both parties have long hailed CBP’s vast system, called the Integrated Surveillance Towers, as a sort of virtual wall that allows agents to better patrol the border. Although the surveillance towers comprise a small fraction of DHS’s gargantuan budget,...

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The Kate Middleton photo scandal is a rare — and consequential — flub

Photo by Paul Ellis / AFP via Getty Images

Kate Middleton’s botched photo editing job seen around the world is more than just catnip for tabloids and TikTok conspiracy theorists. It’s also the most instructive illustration of the AI-flecked new reality we live in, a maelstrom formed when distrust and established processes converge and create chaos.

It’s hard to know what Middleton, aka the Princess of Wales and future Queen of England, was thinking when she allegedly edited her own photo so sloppily that it’s become front-page news in a bunch of countries. Shortly after the image was shared publicly, the world’s biggest wire agencies, like The Associated Press, Getty, and Reuters, issued retraction alerts — called “kill notices” — instructing media outlets to not use the image...

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Grid’s framed, nostalgia-inducing gadgets are up to 40 percent off

The framed edition of the atomic purple Game Boy Color is nearly $30 off for a limited time. | Image: Grid

Of all the tech-centric artwork I’ve seen over the years, few pieces have grabbed me as much as Grid Studio’s framed gadgets and gizmos. The company has been slinging the collage-like pieces for several years now, taking oft-forgotten devices once destined for the landfill and putting them on full display in classy shadowbox-style frames with exploded views. And now, thanks to its annual spring sales event, Grid is offering up to 40 percent off select items through the end of March.

There are plenty of retro and contemporary items to choose from, from controllers to smartphones to gaming consoles that once dominated the handheld market in the US. The iPhone 4S and original NES controller— both of which are on sale for $99 ($70 off),...

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Paramount’s rumored merger: all the news on the potential deals

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

From Warner Bros. Discovery to Comcast, several companies are courting Paramount with deals.

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How to use Low Power Mode on the Apple Watch

Low Power Mode was introduced in watchOS 9 with the Apple Watch Ultra in mind. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

The Apple Watch has never been known for having long battery life. Case in point: Apple never budged from the 18-hour battery life estimate until it launched the Apple Watch Ultra. In 2022, the company introduced a new Low Power Mode when it launched the Ultra, and now, it has extended the time between charges for Apple Watches using watchOS 9 and later.

Previously, the Apple Watch had a Power Reserve mode, which shut off any functions aside from your ability to tell time and turned your smartwatch into a normal watch until you could get it to a charger. This mode is different — it’s more like the iPhone’s Low Power Mode. When enabled, you’ll still be able to use your Apple Watch, but certain power-hungry features will be turned off or...

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A top auto safety group tested 14 partial automated systems — only one passed

Image: General Motors

Driverless cars keep running into roadblocks — and bicyclists — so automakers are doubling down on partially automated systems, betting that customers will appreciate the novelty and convenience of a bunch of features that steer, accelerate, and brake for them.

The industry insists these systems are safe; some executives even go so far as to call them safer than human driving. But a top consumer safety organization argues there is little evidence to support these claims.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a 65-year-old independent group that tests and evaluates new cars, released its first ranking system for partially automated systems. Overall, it tested 14 different systems. Eleven were rated poor, two were marginal,...

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Future Samsung Galaxy Watches could be real square

Circular displays plus the rotating bezel are the Samsung Galaxy Watch’s calling card. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 series isn’t likely to be the company’s most exciting wearable this year. That’ll be the Galaxy Ring. Maybe that’s why rumor has it that Samsung is looking to shake up its watch design. According to SamMobile, the company wants to go back to a squarish design a la the original Galaxy Gear.

This reminds me of the Samsung rumor mill back in early 2022. Then, there were murmurs that the company would be ditching the much-beloved physical rotating bezel. Which was, in my opinion, a stupid, stupid, stupid idea. It was baffling. No other smartwatch maker had the physical rotating bezel, making it Samsung’s signature calling card. Brands kill for iconic designs — why would it voluntarily throw that away? And yet,...

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Discord opens up to games and apps embedded in its chat app

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Discord will soon allow developers to build new games and apps that can be used directly in its chat app. A selection of minigames and apps have been available to Discord users for months now, but starting March 18th, all Discord developers will get access to a new Embedded App SDK that lets them build these special embedded apps.

Discord has used its Activities feature to enable apps like YouTube, promote minigames like poker, and even encourage users to play with a shared whiteboard experience. These apps all appear as an embedded iframe inside Discord, but they’ve been limited to select developers so far.

Image: Discord

We’re going to see a lot more minigames and apps inside Discord.

“Plenty of Discord...

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Roku hackers breach 15,000 accounts and are selling them online

Roku has disclosed a breach that allowed hackers to gain access to 15,363 accounts and stored credit card information, as first reported by Bleeping Computer. In a notice sent to customers, Roku says hackers obtained login information and tried to purchase streaming subscriptions in a “limited number” of instances.

Hackers likely obtained account information exposed in previous data breaches of third-party services, Roku says. This kind of attack, called credential stuffing, involves hackers getting the emails and passwords exposed in data breaches and trying the combination on other services. Once they gained access to an account, Roku hackers changed the login information for some accounts, allowing them to gain full control.

If the...

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Motorola’s newest budget phones look surprisingly good

Moto G Power: Now with NFC and wireless charging. | Image: Motorola

Motorola’s recent budget phones have been held back by lackluster designs, pointless extra cameras, and underwhelming feature sets. But there appears to be hope on the horizon: the 2024 Moto G Power 5G and Moto G 5G look pretty good — at least on paper.

Both phones finally offer NFC (why that was ever missing in the first place is a mystery), and they come with fetching vegan leather back panels. They even include a microSD card slot and a built-in headphone jack, handy features most phone manufacturers abandoned years ago. The G Power 5G also includes wireless charging for the first time — a rare feature in any budget phone. They’ll start at $199 for the Moto G 5G and $299 for the Moto G Power 5G.

The pricier Moto G Power comes with a...

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Gazelle launches ‘first and only’ Class 3 e-bike with Bosch Smart System in the US

This belt-driven C380 HMB with high-step frame can handle more than flat Dutch cities. | Image: Gazelle

Gazelle, the very popular Dutch bike brand owned by industry giant Pon Holdings, is launching its first Class 3 electric bike in the US.

Gazelle says that its new Eclipse is the “first and only Class 3 e-bike in the US to feature Bosch’s Smart System,” which fully integrates the bike’s motor and electronics with the Bosch Flow app for a personalized ride that will receive continuous over-the-air bug fixes and feature updates long after purchase.

Eclipse is available in both high- and low-step frames and built to easily handle heavy loads and hills on a variety of terrain. It features wide 60mm tires, a front shock, Shimano MT-420 four-piston hydraulic disc brakes, a large 750Wh battery, and a mid-drive Bosh motor with an impressive 85Nm...

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Epic details new Unreal Engine pricing plan for non-game developers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Fortnite developer Epic Games will charge non-game developers an annual subscription of $1,850 “per seat” to use its Unreal Engine as opposed to the royalty-based model it uses for game developers. The company announced the changes to its payment scheme last year, and now, it’s providing details on the plan, which will come into effect with the release of Unreal Engine version 5.4 in late April.

The changes don’t apply to game developers, who will continue to pay for access to Epic’s tools via a 5 percent royalty on products that earn over $1 million in lifetime gross revenue. Instead, the new per-seat (effectively per-user) subscription fee will apply to non-game developers such as those who use the Unreal Engine to make linear content...

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The 2024 Vergecast streaming draft

Keeping up with the streaming wars is hard work. The movies and shows keep moving around, everyone is always bundling and then unbundling, and services like Paramount Plus and Hulu seem to be both growing fast and only barely holding onto existence.

That’s why, once a year on The Vergecast, we take a moment and take stock of the streaming landscape. By drafting our favorite services! The goal is to figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and which services are likely to be on top 12 months from now.

We recorded this episode live onstage at SXSW — thanks to everyone who came out and saw us! — and started by recapping last year’s results. Here they are:

• Nilay Patel’s picks: TikTok, the Disney bundle, YouTube TV with Sunday Ticket,...

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Apple to allow iOS app downloads direct from websites in the EU

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple is planning to make further changes in EU countries to allow some developers to distribute their iOS apps directly from a website. The new web distribution feature will be available with a software update “later this spring,” according to Apple, providing developers with a key new way to distribute iOS apps in EU markets without the need for a separate app store — as long as they’re willing to adhere to Apple’s strict rules.

While Apple is opening up iOS to more third-party apps here, these are still some key security protections around how apps are distributed via websites — namely, you’ll still have to work within the strict Apple app development ecosystem. “Apps offered through Web Distribution must meet Notarization...

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Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data scraping

Stability.AI CEO Emad Mostaque is currently investigating the situation. | Illustration: Beatrice Sala

Midjourney says it has banned Stability AI staffers from using its service, accusing employees at the rival generative AI company of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to scrape Midjourney’s data.

Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2nd that acknowledged an extended server outage was preventing generated images from appearing in user galleries. In a summary of a business update call on March 6th, Midjourney claimed that “botnet-like activity from paid accounts” — which the company specifically links to Stability AI employees — was behind the outage.

Image: Midjourney / Discord

These meeting notes were posted to Midjourney’s official Discord channel following an...

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Tesla’s going back to court over Autopilot’s role in a deadly 2018 crash

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tesla will soon return to court over a crash that led to the death of Wei “Walter” Huang nearly six years ago. The trial will take place in California the week of March 18th and will determine whether Tesla and its driver-assist software are at fault for the fatal accident, according to a report from Reuters.

In March 2018, Huang died after his Autopilot-enabled Model X crashed into a safety barrier along US Highway 101 in Mountain View, California. An investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board later found that both Autopilot and distracted driving contributed to the crash, as phone data indicated Huang was playing a mobile game.

However, Huang’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Tesla in 2019, alleging the...

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JBL’s retro-style Authentics 300 smart speaker has dropped to an all-time low

The retro-style smart speaker delivers powerful sound and offers simultaneous support for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

There aren’t a lot of smart speakers on the market that support Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant simultaneously, which is one of the reasons the JBL Authentics 300 stands out. Unfortunately, it’s expensive at its full retail price of $449.99, but Amazon is selling the portable smart speaker right now at a new all-time low of $278 ($172 off).

The midrange 300 can listen for wake words for both virtual assistants and deliver powerful sound free of distortion at louder volumes, allowing it to outperform even the new Sonos Move 2. It also lets you play music over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or via an aux jack or USB-C, and it sports handy dials for easily adjusting the EQ. The speaker also looks cool thanks to a ‘70s-style vibe, which uses faux...

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The best fitness trackers to buy right now

Photo illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

From simple fitness bands and rugged sports watches to rings, these are the best trackers you can get.

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The Finals gets a new game mode, private matches, and more gadgets for season 2

Image: Embark Studios

The Finals, a first-person arena shooter, is moving into its second season later this week that introduces a new 5v5 game mode, more weapons, new abilities, and even private matches. It’s a big update to a popular game that’s centered on a destructible environment.

Power Shift, the new 5v5 game mode, is perhaps the biggest change, which sees two teams of players fighting it out to control a platform (very King of the Hill) to score points. The platform itself will tear through the environment and can be rocked by objects and abilities. In this mode, players can even switch between light, medium, and heavy builds to better compete against the enemy team.

Image: Embark Studios

The new 5v5 game mode in The Finals_._

...

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AI-generated recipes won’t get you to Flavortown

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Last year, as an experiment, I baked cakes from recipes generated by ChatGPT and Bard. It went better than I expected — because much of each recipe didn’t seem created by AI at all.

The recipes I got were eerily familiar to recipes I’ve seen on food blogs or Instagram. They’d been slightly changed, and only Bard (now called Gemini) bothered offering attribution, linking to a recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. In some ways, this isn’t a new problem; I’ve seen far too many copied non-AI recipes floating around the internet. AI, though, makes the ethics of recipe copying more fraught. Its sheer scale threatens to create a world where human recipe developers are crowded out by semi-randomized AI-generated competition, but while there...

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WB’s Smash Bros.-style fighter Multiversus is launching in May

Image: Player First Games

Warner Bros. Games has announced a release date for Multiversus, its Smash Bros.-style fighter starring characters from all over the WB universe. Multiversus will launch as a free-to-play game on May 28th.

Mics? Checked. MVPs? Rabid. Netcode? Updated. Game engine? Unreal 5’d. Tony? Ready. #MultiVersus launch date? May 28th. pic.twitter.com/CWnXDL1Mr4

— MultiVersus (@multiversus) March 11, 2024

There seemed to be hints that some news from the fighting game would be coming soon. Last week, the game’s X account tweeted for the first time after more than a six months of quiet.

*taps mic* testing, testing, 1, 2, 3

— MultiVersus (@multiversus) March 5, 2024

Last year, Multiversus underwent an open beta that lasted more than a year...

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