Rabbit, Humane, and the iPad

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

The Rabbit R1 is not good. Neither is the Humane AI Pin. Does that signal the end of the AI gadget revolution before it ever really got started? Or is it just that two companies shipped too little, too soon? The whole AI industry is moving fast, and it sometimes makes you wonder where it’s actually headed — or if there’s anywhere at the end of the road.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we discuss our reviews of these new devices, their potential going forward, and whether there’s ever going to be an AI gadget that isn’t just your phone. Because the phone AI is coming.

We also discuss the latest news in Google’s antitrust trial as it finally starts to come to a close. After months of arguments and mountains of evidence, what happens...

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Mars Express is a smart and stylish addition to the sci-fi noir canon

Image: GKids

Mars Express is a futuristic detective story about the autonomy of synthetic beings — which is to say, it’s the latest in a long line of sci-fi influenced by Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner. But while its premise may be familiar, the movie makes up for it with style and energy. The debut feature from director Jérémie Périn, Mars Express features absolutely stunning 2D animation, a fully realized world, and a pulse-pounding story that kept me guessing right until the end.

It’s set in 2200, a point in time when Earth is described as a “slum for the unemployed,” while Mars has become somewhat better... at least for the rich, who live in what’s best described as a futuristic vision of the suburbs under a protective dome with bright...

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Nintendo DMCA takedown wipes over 8,500 Yuzu emulator copies

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After slamming the Switch emulator Yuzu with a $2.4 million lawsuit that caused it to shut down, Nintendo is now taking aim at its copies. The gaming giant submitted a total of 8,535 takedown notices for Yuzu emulator forks on GitHub, as spotted earlier by TorrentFreak and PCGamer.

When news of Nintendo’s lawsuit against Yuzu first broke, users began preserving the emulator’s code by making copies and uploading it to places like GitHub. But now, a copy of Nintendo’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request says GitHub took action “against the entire network of 8,535 repositories, inclusive of the parent repository.”

The request says the repositories in question “offer and provide access to the yuzu emulator or code,”...

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Spotify leaks suggest lossless audio is almost ready

We’ve been teased for long enough, Spotify. Just drop the HiFi update already. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

After years of waiting for Spotify to release the lossless audio tier it promised, some leaked UI elements suggest the project is alive and kicking, if not (dare I say) possibly close to release.

Spotify’s current bitrate tops out at 320kbps, but that could soon change if screenshots taken from version 1.2.36 of Spotify by Redditor OhItsTom are accurate. They show what users could expect from the lossless feature, including a device compatibility checker and lossless streaming quality of up to 1,411kbps, and it could go even higher.

Another section mentions lossless quality of up to 2,117kbps can be achieved, which could consume 15.9MB of data per minute. Listening support of up to 24-bit/44.1kHz may also be available for “limited...

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Multibillion-dollar Apple deal looms large in Google antitrust trial

Illustration: The Verge

Google has not one but two Department of Justice antitrust trials this year — and the first one, over Google Search, is finally coming to a close. On Thursday, lawyers showed up at the district court in Washington, DC, for the first of two days of closing arguments in the bench trial before Judge Amit Mehta.

This was the first tech anti-monopoly lawsuit the government had filed in two decades since US v. Microsoft. Its outcome directly affects one of the most valuable companies in the world. At this stage, the judge will only determine whether Google is liable for the antitrust charges brought against it. If so, there will be a separate proceeding to determine appropriate remedies. These could be court-ordered constraints on Google’s...

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Ryûsuke Hamaguchi wants you to watch his new movie at least twice

CMPR

In an interview with The Verge, the director explains why you need to see his new film, Evil Does Not Exist, multiple times to understand the ending.

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Microsoft says it did a lot for responsible AI in inaugural transparency report

Illustration: The Verge

A new report from Microsoft outlines the steps the company took to release responsible AI platforms last year.

In its Responsible AI Transparency Report, which mainly covers 2023, Microsoft touts its achievements around safely deploying AI products. The annual AI transparency report is one of the commitments the company made after signing a voluntary agreement with the White House in July last year. Microsoft and other companies promised to establish responsible AI systems and commit to safety.

Microsoft says in the report that it created 30 responsible AI tools in the past year, grew its responsible AI team, and required teams making generative AI applications to measure and map risks throughout the development cycle. The company...

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Apple’s earnings show that, yeah, it’s really time for some new iPads

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Less than a week ahead of its much-anticipated iPad hardware event, Apple shared its Q2 2024 earnings today, and the numbers paint a predictable picture for the increasingly dated tablet line. iPad revenue fell substantially yet again (by 17 percent year over year) amid the longest-ever wait for new models — something Apple is days away from finally rectifying. At the same time, iPhone sales tapered off a bit (down 10 percent), while the company’s services business remains the star of the show. It was up 14 percent compared to the year-ago quarter.

Apple also released its Vision Pro headset during this quarter, but CEO Tim Cook didn’t offer any indication of how things are going. “During the quarter, we were thrilled to launch Apple...

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Here are the best AirPods deals you can get right now

The third-gen AirPods, Apple’s midrange earbuds, are on sale for $161.99. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

If you know where to look, you can often score discounts on Apple’s ever-popular AirPods. Since Apple launched the third-gen AirPods at the end of 2021, we’ve seen the starting price of the second-gen, entry-level model consistently dip below $100. And now that the second-gen AirPods Pro have 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 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 second-gen AirPods — now the...

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FCC asks for more money to help telecom providers replace Huawei and ZTE gear

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

The Federal Communications Commission is asking for more funding to help internet service providers rip and replace equipment made by Huawei and ZTE. In a letter to Congress, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel says the government has only allocated $1.9 billion to reimburse providers, which is $3.08 billion less than the $4.98 billion the FCC estimates it will need.

After designating the China-owned Huawei and ZTE as national security risks in 2020, former President Donald Trump signed a law forcing telecom providers to “rip and replace” the equipment from their networks. However, a lack of funding has slowed the project. In January, the FCC reported that only five program participants had fully removed, replaced, and disposed of the...

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Seagate’s 2TB Xbox Storage Expansion Card gets its best discount yet

Seagate’s speedy storage expansion cards are a necessary evil and expensive without these periodic sales. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

If your main gaming platform is the Xbox Series X or S and you have a particularly deep library, bring it in for a hug. The markups on its proprietary storage cards are exorbitant, but regular discounts are starting to make them a little more affordable. For example, Seagate’s 2TB Storage Expansion Card is on sale for $226.76 (down from $359.99) at Amazon, which beats the all-time low by three whole dollars.

The expansion cards are officially licensed by Microsoft and support Xbox’s speedy NVME-based Velocity Architecture to enable quicker data streaming and features like Quick Resume. They’re the only type of storage you can use to play games built for the Series X / S. It’s also worth putting older games on the faster storage,...

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When notifications remind us of things we’d rather forget

Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images

My breaking point with promotional emails and desktop alerts finally happened a few weeks ago. I woke up at 7AM to an automated Legacy.com email with my friend’s death-a-versary in the subject line. The email itself was annoying enough, but what it said made it a cold, thoughtless annoyance: “Being remembered matters. The flowers you sent last year were a comforting gesture of sympathy and support.”

I didn’t send flowers. I planted a tree. That’s what my friend wanted. It was right there on the obituary guestbook Legacy.com was asking me to sign again.

Actually, the Legacy.com email was just the last straw. Things were kicked off a few months earlier by a Microsoft OneDrive notification. I had just switched from Google Drive, and...

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy broke labor laws by saying workers are ‘better off’ without a union

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated labor laws when making “coercive statements” about unions during interviews conducted in 2022, a judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Wednesday.

The ruling, which stems from a complaint filed in October 2022, cites three instances in which Jassy commented negatively about unions. During an interview with CNBC in April 2022, Jassy said employees are “better off” not forming a union. Jassy made similar remarks during The New York Times’ DealBook event and Bloomberg’s Technology Summit.

“What we tell our employees in our fulfillment centers is that we think they’re better off without a union for a few reasons,” Jassy said at the DealBook Summit. “One is we try to hire people who we empower,...

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After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat

The Ecobee Smart Thermostat will lose its smarts on July 31st. | Image: Ecobee

Ecobee is discontinuing support for the very first smart thermostat. As of July 31st, 2024, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat and the Ecobee Energy Management System (EMS) thermostats will no longer be able to be controlled remotely or use any smart integrations. Basically, anything that requires an internet connection will stop working. They will still continue to control your HVAC in the same way a non-smart device does — by you controlling it on the device.

The company is offering affected users a 30 percent discount on a new Ecobee thermostat, valid for up to 15 thermostats. Customers should have received an email with the offer, but if not, Ecobee’s VP of product design, Bryan Hurren, says to contact support to get a code.

The Ecobee...

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Here are the best iPad deals right now

iPads go on sale quite frequently, but some discounts are getting harder to find as new models approach. | Image: The Verge

While the best iPad deals usually land during major sale events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Amazon’s various Prime Days, many of the best iPad deals from the holiday season have persisted into 2024. The discounts come and go like changing winds, but you can still take advantage of sales on many models today, particularly on the more affordable iPads. What’s more, prices are likely to drop even further when Apple ushers in a new slate of iPad Pro and iPad Air models,

Forthcoming models aside, it’s difficult to know where exactly you can find the most notable iPad deals unless you’re scouring the major retailers on a daily basis. But that’s often what our deal hunters at The Verge are doing each and every day, so let us help you...

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FDA qualifies Apple Watch’s AFib history for use in clinical studies

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The Apple Watch’s atrial fibrillation (AFib) history feature, which records and alerts the wearer’s relevant heart events, has been qualified to join the FDA’s Medical Device Development Tools (MDDT) program — a first for a “digital health technology.” That means the Apple Watch is now usable in clinical studies that need estimated data on how much time the wearer spent in atrial fibrillation while wearing the device, 9to5Mac reports.

The FDA announcement describes using it as a noninvasive way to collect the data both before and after treatment:

Designed to be used as a biomarker test to help evaluate estimates of AFib burden as a secondary effectiveness endpoint within clinical studies intended to evaluate the safety and effectiveness...

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Passkeys: all the news and updates around passwordless sign-ins

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images

Follow along as websites, apps, and services adopt passkeys in preparation for a passwordless future.

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The last thing the iPad needs is a spec bump

The iPad is kind of a computer... but kind of not. | Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge

When Apple CEO Tim Cook and a bunch of his deputies take the virtual stage next week to announce new iPads, they’re going to spend a lot of time talking about specs. If the rumors are true, we’re going to get new iPad Pros with OLED screens and thinner bodies, new Airs with faster chips and a correctly placed front camera, and a couple of new accessories. Before they even launch, I feel confident telling you these are the best iPads ever. But after all these years, I still don’t know how to tell you whether you should want an iPad. Or what you’d want to do with it.

This has been true forever, of course. The iPad is the jack-of-all-trades in Apple’s lineup, a terrific device in many ways that still feels increasingly redundant now that...

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Microsoft made the biggest renewable energy agreement ever to fuel its AI ambitions

Satya Nadella, the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corporation speaks during the “Microsoft Build: AI Day” event. | Photo by Peerapon Boonyakiat / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Microsoft just agreed to support the development of 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity around the world, a massive amount of electricity to fuel its AI ambitions and climate goals.

For comparison, 10.5 GW of renewable energy amounts to nearly half the amount of solar and wind capacity California had in 2022. This is quite literally a very big deal — effectively the largest corporate agreement to purchase renewable energy to date, according to BloombergNEF. Microsoft inked the agreement yesterday with Brookfield Asset Management, which said the deal is almost eight times bigger than what was previously the single largest corporate power purchase agreement ever signed.

Microsoft is pumping a lot of its resources into AI o...

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The highest observatory in the world just opened in Chile

Image: University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory (TAO) officially opened on Tuesday after 26 years of planning and construction. Sitting 18,500 feet high on Mount Chajnantor in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the 6.5-meter optical-infrared TAO telescope is now the highest in the world.

TAO replaces a smaller version of itself called MiniTAO, which held the highest telescope distinction before it. It beats the Chacaltaya Observatory, owned by the University of Madrid and sitting 17,191 feet on Mount Chacaltaya in Bolivia.

The next three record holders in the top five are also in Chile’s Atacama desert: the James Ax Observatory (17,100 feet); the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (17,030 feet); and the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory (sources vary;...

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Warrantless FBI searches of American communications drop 50 percent

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

The FBI cut its warrantless searches of American data in half in 2023, according to a government report released on Tuesday. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s annual transparency report, the FBI conducted 57,094 searches of “US person” data under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year — a 52 percent decrease from 2022.

In a press briefing, a senior FBI official said that the drop was due to reforms the agency implemented in 2021 and 2022, The Record reports. Despite the drop in overall searches of Americans’ data, the report also notes that the number of foreign targets whose data could be searched in the Section 702 database rose to 268,590, a 9 percent increase from the...

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Apple gives small developers more ways around its alternative app store tax

Image: The Verge

Apple is exempting more developers from the Core Technology Fee (CTF) it introduced in the European Union. In an update on Thursday, Apple announced that developers of free apps without monetization won’t have to pay the new fee.

To qualify, Apple says free apps must not have “revenue of any kind,” including money made from physical or digital goods, as well as advertising. “This condition is intended to give students, hobbyists, and other non-commercial developers an opportunity to create a popular app without paying the CTF,” Apple writes in the update.

The company also says small developers with less than €10 million in global annual business revenue will receive a three-year free “on-ramp” to the CTF “to help them create innovative...

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Google is getting even worse for independent sites

Illustration: The Verge

An article in HouseFresh, a site dedicated to air quality, hit a nerve in February: it outlined how independent publishers have been gradually bumped out of Google search results, with big media companies taking their place. Months later, the situation has only gotten more dire, according to a follow-up published by HouseFresh.

In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first content, designed to do not much more than rank highly on Google.

In a piece published...

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Rabbit R1 review: nothing to see here

Artificial intelligence might someday make technology easier to use and even do things on your behalf. All the Rabbit R1 does right now is make me tear my hair out.

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Spotify’s shortform videos could spread to more parts of the app

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Spotify could soon bring shortform video clips to more areas of the app. A test spotted by Music Ally shows clips surfacing on playlist pages, allowing you to swipe through a vertical feed with videos less than 30 seconds long.

Spotify first introduced clips last year as a way for artists to communicate with fans and promote their music, but the platform only showed clips on artist profiles, album pages, and album countdown pages. However, that seems to be changing, as Music Ally found clips cropping up at the top of Spotify’s “Pop Drive” playlist, where you can swipe through short videos from artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Benson Boone.

As pointed out by Music Ally, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek hinted at the expansion of clips during an...

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Nintendo’s Orlando theme park will have Yoshi and Donkey Kong rides

Image: Universal Studios / Nintendo

The Super Nintendo World area opening at Universal Studios in Orlando next year will include every attraction from the existing theme parks in Hollywood and Japan — including the first Donkey Kong Country realm in the US. That’s according to Universal’s latest teaser for its fourth Orlando-based park, Epic Universe, which provides some clarity over what guests can expect on opening day in 2025.

Some of the experiences coming to Orlando’s Super Nintendo World include Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge, an interactive track ride already featured at the Hollywood park that’s inspired by the Mario Kart racing game series, and a version of the Mine-Cart Madness roller coaster that’s under construction in Japan’s Donkey Kong Country.

Universal...

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I Saw the TV Glow is a tribute to the transformative power of fandom

Image: A24

A24’s I Saw the TV Glow from writer / director Jane Schoenbrun is a brilliant exploration of how people can find and lose themselves in the media they love.

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Microsoft launches passkey support for all consumer accounts

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft is fully rolling out passkey support for all consumer accounts today. After enabling them in Windows 11 last year, Microsoft account owners can also now generate passkeys across Windows, Android, and iOS. This makes it effortless to sign in to a Microsoft account without having to type a password in every time.

You can create passkeys for your Microsoft account by following this link, and you can choose your face, fingerprint, PIN, or a security key to use a device to sign in with a passkey.

Image: Microsoft

How passkeys work when you sign in to a Microsoft account.

“Today, you can use a passkey to sign in to Microsoft apps and websites, including Microsoft 365 and Copilot on desktop and mobile...

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The best entertainment of 2024

Image: Prime Video

Finding something to watch or play can sometimes feel like work — there’s just so much out there vying for your free time. That’s true whether you’re heading to a theater, browsing the many streaming platforms, or looking for a new video game. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with choice.

So, as we’ve done in years past, we’re collecting all of our favorite releases from 2024 in one place. The goal is to make your decision-making a little easier. That could mean highlighting anything from an anticipated movie that actually lives up to the hype to a surprise indie game that takes the world by storm.

And we’ll be updating this page all year long as we continue to check out the latest in film, television, and gaming — so stay tuned.

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Tales of Kenzera’s heart-wrenching story proved tougher than its platforming

Image: Surgent Studios

There’s challenging combat and platforming puzzles, but the hardest part of the game is grappling with its emotional story.

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