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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon-owned Twitch is rolling out its Watch Parties feature, which lets streamers host viewing parties for movies and TV shows on Amazon Prime, to Android and iOS, the company announced Wednesday. Watch Parties first launched on desktop web in September . While Watch Parties are a potentially fun way for Twitch streamers to hang out with their communities, there’s one important catch: only viewers who also have an Amazon Prime or Prime Video subscription can join the party to watch what’s being shown. Watch Parties are now rolling out on an Android or iOS device near you. To learn more about Watch Parties, including how to host your own, check out the help article at https://t.co/YvqLMCD5c6 . pic.twitter.com/5aQC9It02G — Twitch... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced on Wednesday that it’s fining Robinhood almost $70 million to settle charges over issues it identified with the company’s stock trading service. The authority claims that the financial app company neglected its duty to supervise trades, maintain its own technology, and protect its customers. The fine is the largest in FINRA’s history and Robinhood has agreed to pay. FINRA says since 2016 Robinhood has periodically provided false and misleading information on topics like whether customers were able to place trades on margin (using credit from Robinhood to buy shares), including displaying inaccurate information in its app on how much cash was in customers’ accounts. Robinhood’s... Continue reading…

Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images Right now, you could wake up and turn on Wimbledon. By the afternoon, there will be EuroCup matches. And then, in the evenings, we’ve had some thrillingly chaotic basketball — both men’s and women’s, plus hockey and baseball. What a time to be alive (and working from home)! Best of all: it’s all streaming, and I think finally, in 2021, we’re in a place where it’s relatively effortless to watch sports without being tethered to the dregs of convoluted cable packages. Is this the golden age of watching sports during the workday? I mean, I wouldn’t know. Because I, like all staffers at The Verge , am an extremely diligent employee and would never do anything that would distract me throughout the entire workday. Bosses, if you’re reading this,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The state of Maine now has the most stringent laws regulating government use of facial recognition in the country. The new law prohibits government use of facial recognition except in specifically outlined situations, with the most broad exception being if police have probable cause that an unidentified person in an image committed a serious crime, or for proactive fraud prevention. Since Maine police will not have access to facial recognition, they will be able to ask the FBI and Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) to run these searches. Crucially, the law plugs loopholes that police have used in the past to gain access to the technology, like informally asking other agencies or third parties to run backchannel searches for them. Logs... Continue reading…

Image: Disney Disney’s IP has once again fully synergized with the arrival of a new Marvel-themed Simpsons short titled “The Good, The Bart, and The Loki.” Disney very much appears to be putting that $71 billion investment in IP from 21st Century Fox to work. The company announced Wednesday that the special will debut July 7th exclusively on its streaming service Disney Plus. Tom Hiddleston, who plays Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will also voice Loki in the Simpsons adaptation. Because Disney owns everything and we’ve evidently reached peak content, the key art for the animated short is styled similarly to that of Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame — which is not even the first time Disney has done this. But Lisa as Thor and Ralph Wiggum as Hulk... Continue reading…

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg Apple’s iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 won’t launch fully until later in 2021, but you don’t need to be a developer to test the public beta right now. If you’re willing to risk encountering possible bugs in order to try out the new features, we’re going to walk you through the steps for installing the software. It’s a similar process for iPhone and iPad, but we’ve made separate sections for each OS. These betas will update periodically leading up to the final release. Judging from years past, that release should be around the end of the summer, close to when Apple hosts its usual autumn hardware event. Before we get started, here’s the usual word of warning about installing unfinished beta software: these releases may seem stable for general use,... Continue reading…

Hands-on with the public betas Continue reading…

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Microsoft and Google have reportedly ended a six-year truce on legal battles. The Financial Times reports that Microsoft and Google formed an unusual truce in 2015, which expired in April. The pact was reportedly forged to avoid legal battles and complaints to regulators. It meant we haven’t seen Microsoft and Google complaining publicly about each other since the days of Scroogled , a campaign that attacked Google’s privacy policies. Now the gloves appear to be off once again, and we’ve seen some evidence of that recently. Google slammed Microsoft for trying to “break the way the open web works” earlier this year, after Microsoft publicly supported a law in Australia that forced Google to pay news publishers for their content. Microsoft... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Google has announced a big change for developers who want to list their apps on Google Play that could have an impact on the Android app ecosystem. Right now, the standard format for app publishing is the APK, but starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps are published instead using the Android App Bundle. On a Google page about Android App Bundle , the company touts many potential improvements with the new format, such as smaller app downloads for users. But the format has a catch: Android App Bundles are a format that only Google Play uses, which could complicate app redistribution. The App Bundles requirement only applies to new apps The timing of Google’s announcement also comes just days after Microsoft announced... Continue reading…

Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images The World Health Organization released a guidance document outlining six key principles for the ethical use of artificial intelligence in health. Twenty experts spent two years developing the guidance, which marks the first consensus report on AI ethics in healthcare settings. The report highlights the promise of health AI, and its potential to help doctors treat patients — particularly in under-resourced areas. But it also stresses that technology is not a quick fix for health challenges, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and that governments and regulators should carefully scrutinize where and how AI is used in health. The WHO said it hopes the six principles can be the foundation for how governments, developers, and... Continue reading…

PUBG Mobile is currently one of Tencent’s biggest titles. | Image: Tencent Games Tencent’s sprawling games empire just grew one studio bigger. Uncapped Games is a new Los Angeles-based studio led by Blizzard veterans Jason Hughes and David Kim. Hughes is serving as the studio’s lead producer and has previously worked on Diablo III and IV , while Kim is its lead designer and has previously worked on StarCraft 2 and Diablo IV . The new studio’s focus will be on real-time strategy (RTS) games, with a focus on creating the “next great PC RTS,” Kim says. Although the RTS genre has remained consistently popular over the years, it continues to be dominated by ‘90s franchises like StarCraft , Age of Empires , and Command and Conquer . A fresh entry to the genre would be no bad thing. “Making the next great PC RTS has been my... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge AT&T and Google have announced that all Android phones on the network will use Google’s Android Messages app for SMS and RCS services. T-Mobile made the exact same partnership deal with Google in March, which leaves Verizon as the only US carrier who hasn’t committed to switching its customers to Android Messages by default. Along with the switch to Messages comes another important shift: real interoperability with RCS on other networks. AT&T has supported RCS for awhile now, but that support has been as haphazard as it was half-hearted. The new deal also means that AT&T customers will benefit from the rollout of end-to-end encryption for RCS that Google is rolling out to all customers this year (that rollout has already begun, in... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called for an investigation of Google’s alleged manipulation of the marketplace for online ads, opening the door for a new federal regulator for digital advertising markets. Warren’s letter focuses on a program called “Project Bernanke,” revealed in April as part of a lawsuit against Google led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Under that program, Google allegedly used historical Google Ads data to boost clients’ chances of winning auctions. The practice allegedly resulted in $230 million in additional revenue for the company. “The market for digital advertising has become perhaps the most actively traded commodity exchange in... Continue reading…

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge The auto industry is holding its fire — for now — over the new requirement to report crashes involving vehicles equipped with partially and fully autonomous driving systems. But automakers are also distancing themselves from the company that appears to be the primary target of the new rule: Tesla. The rule , issued yesterday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, requires companies like Tesla and Alphabet’s Waymo to report incidents involving driver assistance and autonomous systems within one day of learning of a crash, a major change that signals a tougher stance by regulators. car companies are taking a wait-and-see approach So far, car companies are taking a wait-and-see approach, mostly lauding NHTSA’s commitment to... Continue reading…

J.J. Guest  and  G.C. Baccaris Does anybody else remember Excalibur? You know, Excalibur: the British TV show that ran for two seasons in the mid-1970s, mixing Arthurian legend with Aleister Crowley mysticism, interplanetary exploration, an undead (sorry, spoilers!) villain named Poseidon, and a deeply troubled production history? If so, that’s a little weird because it never existed — but if enough people remember it, maybe that could change. Excalibur is, in fact, an interactive fiction project made by J. J. Guest, G. C. Baccaris, and Duncan Bowsman. It’s a detailed “fan wiki” for the eponymous (and fictitious) BBC series, and clicking through it reveals layers of in-show plot summaries, behind-the-scenes cast and crew drama, and a running conflict between the... Continue reading…

Wing, the drone delivery arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has launched a free app in the US to help pilots fly their drones legally. OpenSky has been available in Australia since 2019 but is now available for both commercial and recreational pilots in the US to use for anything from conducting commercial surveys to filming and photography. It’s available now on both iOS and Android. OpenSky is based on Google Maps, Wing tells DroneLife , and it’s color-coded to show areas where pilots can and can’t fly. Green areas are a-okay, but pilots need to exercise caution in yellow areas, and shouldn’t fly at all in red areas. Perhaps its most useful feature is that it lets pilots submit requests to fly in controlled airspace and receive... Continue reading…

This radical editing collective is unlearning what they know about film Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Slack gets new features born out of the pandemic Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft’s first Windows 11 preview looks promising Continue reading…

Looking through a microscope, doctoral candidate Simón(e) Sun takes a tiny glass pipette and gently attaches it to a neuron in a petri dish. She’s taking recordings of synaptic activity, the electrochemical signals neurons use to communicate with each other. The data Sun gathers will be used to understand microprocesses in the brain. It will also be turned into music. Bridging science and art, Sun wrote a computer program that takes her data and converts it into song . And the ethereal MIDI sounds aren’t just nice to listen to — they can actually teach us a lot about how the brain works. Sun is studying something called “ homeostatic plasticity ,” which is how neurons regulate their activity. Her research has broad implications for the... Continue reading…

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images Virgin Orbit is gearing up for its debut commercial mission from Southern California, five months after the company first reached orbit during a January test flight . Seven satellites from three different countries are loaded onto a rocket that will blast off in midair from Virgin Orbit’s modified Boeing 747 less than an hour after the plane departs the Mojave Air and Space Port. Take off of the carrier aircraft, the modified Boeing plane named Cosmic Girl, is expected for 9:50AM ET. About an hour later, a 70-foot-long two-stage rocket called LauncherOne will ignite its single engine and take off from under the plane’s left wing over the Pacific ocean, zooming out of Earth’s atmosphere. The Netherlands’ first military satellite, three... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sports streaming service DAZN announced today that it has acquired exclusive rights to stream the UEFA Women’s Champions League. As part of the deal, an overwhelming majority of the matches it streams over the next four seasons will be available for free on its YouTube channel. DAZN — best known in the US as a hub for boxing events — expanded to over 200 countries in December. It’s backed by billionaire Len Blavatnik who aspires to make DAZN the “Netflix of sport.” Former Disney exec Kevin Mayer joined DAZN as chairman in March to help make that happen, after Mayer abruptly quit TikTok due to Trump’s meddling . While at Disney, Mayer led the development of the wildly successful Disney Plus service and was widely believed to be Bob Iger’s... Continue reading…

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge There’s a fantastic discount happening on the previous generation Sony WH-1000XM3 wireless, noise-canceling headphones at Best Buy. Originally $350 (but usually around $250 or so these days), you can get them for $190 new . While these lack some niceties found in the newer XM4 model (concurrent Bluetooth connections, auto play / pause when you remove them or put them on), the package is overall similar in terms of nailing the fundamentals. These have great battery life, USB-C charging, among the best noise cancellation effect around, and sound quality that’s tough to beat at this price. In addition, these come with a zip-up case that makes them easy to stow. I bought these in 2018 and am still patting myself on the back for that decision. ... Continue reading…

Photo: GitHub GitHub and OpenAI have launched a technical preview of a new AI tool called Copilot , which lives inside the Visual Studio Code editor and autocompletes code snippets. Copilot does more than just parrot back code it’s seen before, according to GitHub. It instead analyzes the code you’ve already written and generates new matching code, including specific functions that were previously called. Examples on the project’s website include automatically writing the code to import tweets, draw a scatterplot, or grab a Goodreads rating. It works best with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go, according to a blog post from GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. A descendant of GPT-3 GitHub sees this as an evolution of pair programming, where two coders... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Monday, Microsoft finally delivered two long-in-the-works updates for its Xbox Cloud Gaming Service (xCloud) that could mark a sea change for the future of cloud gaming. One is that xCloud games are now powered by custom Xbox Series X hardware, a major upgrade from the Xbox One S consoles that have powered the service since its launch in September. This means xCloud now has faster load times, less latency, and higher-resolution 1080p streaming. But perhaps more importantly, xCloud is expanding from Android to iOS and PC via the web for anyone in 22 countries with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. Taken together, the two updates mean that nearly anyone who has access to the service can play some of the biggest games on Xbox,... Continue reading…

Good Omens is returning for a second season on Amazon Prime Video, the company announced today, with stars Michael Sheen and David Tennant returning to reprise their roles as the odd-couple angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley. Also back for season 2 is Neil Gaiman, who co-wrote the original novel together with Terry Pratchett and will be returning as showrunner alongside Douglas Mackinnon (who directed the first season). Gaiman will also be writing the second season together with John Finnemore. The six-episode first season was originally conceived as a standalone miniseries, and already covered the entirety of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s original novel. So much so that both Gaiman and Rhianna Pratchett, Terry’s daughter, shot... Continue reading…

Photo: Marvel Studios Natasha Romanoff finally gets her standalone film Continue reading…

Microsoft’s big security push is complicated Continue reading…

Photo by Matt Doughtery / KPRC2 Houston Car companies will be required to report crashes involving advanced driver assistance systems under new rules proposed by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The general order will apply to manufacturers of vehicles equipped with Level 2 driver assist systems through fully autonomous Level 5 systems, according to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ taxonomy for autonomous vehicles. At Level 2, the vehicle can control both steering and acceleration and deceleration, but it falls short of self-driving because a human sits in the driver’s seat and can take control of the car at any time. Level 5 refers to a fully autonomous vehicle that can travel anywhere, under any conditions. Notably, there are not Level 5... Continue reading…

The ZenFone 8 delivers flagship-level build quality and performance in a small package Continue reading…

Logitech announced its new G335 wired gaming headset that’s available for preorder now at $69.99 . It’s expected to ship in July. The G335 borrows several design elements from the $129.99 G733 wireless model released in 2020 , including its expressive color options (as well as a new mint colorway), the comfortable bungee headband, breathable ear pads, a volume dial built into the right ear cup, and a flip-to-mute microphone. This more affordable model is compatible with the G733’s replaceable headband straps and mic covers sold through Logitech’s site, but it does away with most of that headset’s fancier features, like USB-C charging and the strip of RGB lighting on the front side of the ear cups. Logitech says this wired model has a... Continue reading…

At their best, Super Mario sports titles move beyond the game they’re trying to mimic. You don’t have to care about cars or racing to enjoy Mario Kart , just as you don’t need to know who Pep Guardiola is to have fun with Super Mario Strikers . The sport is just a starting point. From there, Nintendo’s designers expand on it with all kinds of interesting and new ideas. Mario Golf: Super Rush , which is out now on the Nintendo Switch, does some of this. There are familiar characters with superpowers, courses with strange obstacles, and a new mode that’s supposed to emphasize speed over all else. Ultimately, though, Super Rush ends up feeling a little too much like, well, golf. Super Rush at least gets the basics right. Swinging a club feels... Continue reading…

Hyundai has officially completed its acquisition of Boston Dynamics , the creator of the internet’s favorite dancing Spot and Atlas robots (which only occasionally look like dystopian nightmare machines ). And to celebrate, the company is collaborating with K-pop sensation BTS on a new video that shows seven Spot robots grooving to the band’s 2020 song “ IONIQ: I’m On It .” And while Spot’s smooth dance moves might bring a frisson of worry to any K-pop fans thinking that K-pop boy-bands might be the next industry that Boston Dynamics is targeting for its robots to replace human workers in, right now it seems that BTS isn’t too worried about the competition. A second video shows off the band celebrating the Hyundai acquisition alongside a... Continue reading…

The Asus ZenFone 8. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge The Zenfone 8 , Asus’ well-specced and compact competitor to the iPhone 12 mini, has launched in the US. The company is currently selling two versions of the phone on its website . There’s a model with 128GB of storage which will eventually sell for $629 once its early bird pricing of $599 expires on July 13th, while the other has 256GB of storage and costs $699. Both are equipped with 8GB of RAM and are compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks, but not Verizon. We liked the Zenfone 8 when we reviewed it last month . Its 5.9-inch display makes it a relatively compact device in comparison to the rest of the Android market, and its 120Hz refresh rate and Snapdragon 888 processor mean it feels snappy and responsive to use. Its smaller size... Continue reading…

An Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Amazon has announced a new feature for its Kids Plus service on Fire tablets and Echo smart speakers called Reading Sidekick. Designed to help kids improve their reading skills and ability, the Reading Sidekick allows kids to read either physical or digital books along with Alexa by taking turns at reading the books aloud with the digital assistant. The Reading Assistant is included in the Kids Plus service that comes with the Kids edition Fire tablets and Echo speakers or as a $2.99 per month ($4.99 without Amazon Prime) or $69 per year ($99 without Prime) subscription plan and is available starting June 29th. The Reading Sidekick works with most Alexa-enabled devices, including the Echo , Echo Dot , Echo Dot Kids , Echo Plus , and Echo... Continue reading…

Instagram Instagram has always limited who can post swipe-up links to their stories, but today, the company is starting a new test that could widen that ability. In this case, however, it isn’t a swipe up that people will be able to offer, but instead a linking sticker. These stickers will operate the same way a swipe-up link does, except with a tap instead of a swipe. People will also be able to respond to stories that include a sticker, which they can’t currently do with stories that have a swipe up. For now, the test is small, and Vishal Shah, Instagram’s head of product, tells The Verge it’s mostly to learn how people might take advantage of links. They’ll be watching for the types of links people post while keeping a particular eye on... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Best Buy is offering an attractive deal on Razer’s Basilisk Ultimate wireless gaming mouse that includes a charging dock. The current price is $40 off, and you’ll get a $50 gift card to Steam for no extra cost. Amazon is selling this mouse for a similar price, but the Steam gift card bundle is exclusive to Best Buy. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Steam is looped into this deal since its big Summer Sale is happening , bringing discounts to many digital PC games through July 8th. This $50 could get you several games or pay for all of Mass Effect Legendary Edition , as an example. Compared to other mice in Razer’s lineup, this one has perhaps the most features. The scrollwheel can tilt for extra inputs, the DPI clutch for your thumb is... Continue reading…

The original Palm Pre. Physical home buttons are all but extinct on modern smartphones, and the Palm Pre ended them. It’s not hard to notice that smartphones have steadily shed their buttons throughout the years: keyboards, numpads, call and hang up buttons, directional navigation keys, and more have all fallen to the wayside in favor of more versatile touchscreens. In 2007, the iPhone — with its then-revolutionary 3.5-inch multitouch display — helped to push that trend along by reducing navigation down to a single home button. But even as touchscreen sizes grew and buttons fell away, the humble home button stubbornly stuck around. ( Apple wouldn’t ditch the button for over a decade, when the iPhone X arrived in 2017.) But it was the Palm Pre, and its largely... Continue reading…

The Verge, in real life, for two days in New York City. Continue reading…

Here’s the HP Pavilion Aero 13. | HP HP has announced the Pavilion Aero 13, the lightest consumer laptop yet. It has a maximum weight of 2.18 pounds (0.987 kg), making it one of the most portable laptops you can buy of any type or size. It’s also powered by AMD’s Ryzen 5000 mobile processors, up to a Ryzen 7 5800U. On the outside, the Aero is available in four colors: pale rose gold, warm gold, ceramic white, and natural silver. Weight isn’t the only thing getting slimmed down, as this is the first Pavilion with a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio. The Pavilion has traditionally been HP’s budget line, with a bigger and clunkier design than the company’s pricier lines, but HP has been shrinking the bezels and chassis footprints on a number of its models this year. ... Continue reading…

Sony has acquired Housemarque, the Finnish studio behind recent PS5 exclusive Returnal , the company announced today . It was announced with a tweet which suggests Sony might also be about to acquire Bluepoint Games, the studio behind the recent Demon’s Souls remaster. In a blog post announcing the acquisition, PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst said that the studio “is one with incredible vision, capable of creating memorable new games that resonate with our community.” Although Housemarque has produced games across multiple platforms including PC, iOS, and the Xbox 360, the majority of its recent titles have been exclusive to Sony’s platforms. Prior to Returnal it was best known for the Super Stardust games, which have appeared on... Continue reading…

The UltraSharp shown on its two included mounts. | Image: Dell Dell has launched the high-end UltraSharp webcam that costs $199.99 and is available now worldwide. Its cylindrical design is reminiscent of Apple’s old but iconic iSight external webcam, but its features are aimed to compete with Logitech’s Brio and other modern 4K-ready webcams. In addition, it aims to serve as a more affordable and easier-to-set up alternative to mounting a DSLR camera behind your monitor. The UltraSharp is a USB-C webcam that houses a Sony STARVIS CMOS 8.3-megapixel sensor. It’s capable of recording or streaming in 4K at 30 or 24 frames per second and in 1080p or 720p at 24, 30, or 60 frames per second. You can tweak the field of view (FOV) between 65 degrees for a close crop, 78 degrees, or 90 degrees for the... Continue reading…

Image: Nothing Tech startup Nothing will announce its debut pair of true wireless earbuds, the Nothing Ear (1), at 9AM ET on July 27th, the company’s founder Carl Pei announced today . The launch comes around a month later than the June launch window Nothing previously announced , after Pei tweeted that the company was delaying the launch because it had “a few things left to finalize.” Carl Pei is best known as one of the co-founders of OnePlus, a company he parted ways with last year . Details about the Nothing Ear (1) are thin, but the company has teased several details about them over the past few months. We know they’ll have a “stripped-down aesthetic” featuring transparent materials in their construction, and that they’ve been designed in... Continue reading…

OTPs can be set to delete automatically after 24 hours. | Image: Google Google is updating its Messages app in India to allow it to delete one-time passwords (OTPs) automatically, to stop the single-use codes from clogging up your inbox, the company has announced . Alongside it, Google also says the app will be able to sort messages into categories, keeping your personal correspondence away from notifications about bank transactions and special offers. As someone that almost exclusively uses WhatsApp for personal communication, my phone’s default texting app is typically a graveyard of six-digit codes, which by design become useless mere minutes after they’re received. Having the ability to automatically delete them after 24 hours should make Messages less cluttered and more usable. Source:... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google announced a new website designed to be a “one-stop shop” for people with food insecurity. The “Find Food Support” site includes a food locator tool powered by Google Maps which people can use to search for their nearest food bank, food pantry, or school lunch program pickup site in their community. Google is working with non-profit groups like No Kid Hungry and FoodFinder, as well as the US Department of Agriculture, to aggregate 90,000 locations with free food support across all 50 states — with more locations to come. The new site is a product of Google’s newly formed Food for Good team , formerly known as Project Delta when it was headquartered at Alphabet’s X moonshot division. Project Delta’s mission is to... Continue reading…

Microsoft is introducing a new Dynamic Refresh Rate (DRR) feature in Windows 11 that’s designed to save laptop battery life and boost refresh rates when they’re really needed. A number of laptops now ship with 120Hz and beyond displays, which make Windows feel a lot smoother across scrolling, animations, and inking. While the added smoothness feels great, running at higher refresh rates takes its toll on battery life. In Windows 10 you have to decide between 60Hz and 120Hz on a laptop, and it’s a static choice. Microsoft is now building DRR into Windows 11, which will allow a laptop to dynamically adjust its refresh rate. “This means that Windows 11 will seamlessly switch between a lower refresh rate and a higher refresh rate based on... Continue reading…

BMW will stop selling the i3 electric hatchback in the US starting next month. It’s the latest pint-sized vehicle to fall victim to American car buyers’ insatiable appetite for huge, towering, climate-killing trucks and SUVs. First released in 2013, the i3 was BMW’s first real electric vehicle. Always intended to be more of a city car than anything intended for long trips, the i3 maxed out at 80 miles of range from a 22kWh battery, with a modest 170 horsepower. The battery capacity grew 50 percent — to 33kWh — after a 2017 update , increasing the range to 113 miles. Thanks to its kooky, futuristic, and polarizing design, it was never a sales juggernaut, but it certainly developed a cult following over time. The i3 was able to carve out a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Monday, a US District Court dealt a huge blow to the federal government’s antitrust case against Facebook by dismissing a complaint filed against the company by the Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit, filed late last year , sought to unwind Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The judge also dismissed an associated case filed by a group of state attorneys general. In its initial complaint , the FTC alleged that Facebook violated federal antitrust laws by purchasing a would-be competitor in the social media market. But in his decision to dismiss the complaint Monday, Judge James E. Boasberg wrote that the FTC offered insufficient evidence for its central claim — that Facebook wields monopoly power. “This case involves no... Continue reading…

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, is stepping down from his full-time role with the company | Getty Foursquare founder and former CEO Dennis Crowley is stepping down from his full-time role at the company, he wrote in a Medium post on Monday . He’ll remain on the board of directors. “What started around my kitchen table in the East Village back in early 2009 has grown to nearly 400 people working around the world in 2021,” Crowley wrote. “What started as a quest to ‘build a Marauders Map’ and to ‘turn the real world into a game’ and ‘build a hipster version of Clippy’ has turned into one of the world’s leading location technology platforms, powering location services for thousands of apps and top brands around the world.” Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai launched Foursquare in 2009 as a smartphone app that let people use their... Continue reading…

Microsoft’s xCloud, the cloud game streaming component of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate that doesn’t require a console to use, is rolling out fully to iOS devices, including iPhones and iPads, as well as PCs and macOS computers via the web. It’s been in an invite-only beta period since mid-April 2021 , but Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can now access games right from their devices . Microsoft says that on PCs, xCloud can be accessed through the Edge browser and Google Chrome. We’ve gotten it to work within macOS on Microsoft Edge and Safari. More than 100 games are available, and the service is compatible with Bluetooth controllers or ones connected via USB. On iOS, it’ll work as a web-based app via Safari, and you’ll have a choice between a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you haven’t updated to the latest version of Snapchat on iOS, dubbed version 11.34.0.35 and released late Sunday , don’t — the app is crashing on launch ( via Apple Insider ). The company has tweeted that it’s aware of the issue and is working on a fix, but for now if you want to stay snapping you should probably stick with the old version. The bug doesn’t appear to be affecting the Android version of the app. On my iPhone 12 Mini, the app stays open just long enough to give me a message that something went wrong, before crashing to Springboard. It is worth noting, though, that it was giving me that message before I updated as well, indicating that something may be amiss with Snapchat overall. The company did not immediately reply to a... Continue reading…