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Picture this, but with more desks and a breakout area. Disney’s extraordinarily expensive Star Wars hotel isn’t coming back. The building that housed the Galactic Starcruiser is being converted into office space, scuppering hopes that it could be reborn or repurposed into a new interactive attraction. The Wrap reports that the hotel will be converted into an office for Walt Disney Imagineering, the creative arm of the company responsible for its theme parks, retail, and cruise ships. The team located there will reportedly work on upcoming expansions for Florida’s Walt Disney World resort, including a Latin American section of the Animal Kingdom and a Monsters Inc. area within Hollywood Studios. Galactic Starcruiser was an immersive hotel experience set in the Star Wars universe, where the minimum stay cost $4,800 for two people over two nights . It opened in March 2022 but ran for just a year and a half, shutting in September 2023 . It returned to headlines in May 2024 when Yo...

The Minimal Phone is even a Swiftie. When the Minimal Phone was first announced this time last year, you might have been forgiven for thinking it was vaporware. But one year — and many delays — later, the world’s first Android phone with both an E Ink display and a physical QWERTY keyboard has begun shipping to backers. In broad strokes, the Minimal Phone looks a bit like a BlackBerry, with a wide body and a squat screen perched above its streamlined QWERTY keyboard. We’ve seen phones like this before. What makes it stand out is the screen itself, which is a monochrome E Ink panel at a whopping 600 x 800 resolution. Despite using E Ink tech, the Minimal Phone runs Android 14, so the only apps you’re giving up are those that really can’t run on the sluggish display and basic hardware — you won’t be popping many headshots in CoD: Mobile , I fear. Access to all your Android apps might put the lie to Minimal Company’s promise of a “distraction-free” phone, but the company suggests th...

Nvidia warned of stock shortages earlier this week, and now its launch of the $1,999 RTX 5090 yesterday is being branded a “paper launch” after people camped outside retailers only to find a handful of cards available, if any at all. Reddit users have been tracking inventory for RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 cards at Micro Center locations across the US, with some stores opening on Thursday with no RTX 5090 cards at all. The Tustin, California Micro Center store seems to have received the most stock, but other stores reportedly had 10 or less RTX 5090 cards. While Nvidia’s RTX 5080 was a little easier to purchase on launch day, cards rapidly went out of stock at retailers like Best Buy and Amazon. One Reddit poster claims to have secured an RTX 5090 after three days waiting in line, and others have posted purchase vouchers that were handed out to people in line at a Miami Micro Center. The overwhelming amount of posts are from people complaining about the launch and lack of stock, tho...

A little less AI and a lot more poking please. Mark Zuckerberg is planning some big changes for Facebook in a bid to make using the platform feel like it did “back in the day.” During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuck said that Facebook is an important part of its more than three billion monthly users’ lives and that he’s working on making it “way more culturally influential than it is today.” He didn’t divulge any specific changes, only that he’s “excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook,” and that the overhaul will be a significant focus for the company over the next 12 months. Zuckerberg also suggested that Meta may have to sacrifice its short-term business results in order to focus on product changes needed to improve Facebook. “I think that’s sort of a fun and interesting goal that will take our product development in some interesting directions that we maybe haven’t focused as much on in the last several years,” Zuckerberg said during th...

LG is adding Google Cast support to its range of hotel TVs, making it easier to stream content from your phone or other devices. Cast joins existing support for Apple Airplay , and LG is the first manufacturer to offer both options on its hotel TVs. If you stay in a hotel room with a compatible LG TV, you should be able to scan a QR code with your phone and then start streaming video or music directly to the screen from a user interface you’re already comfortable with. That way you won’t have to enter any personal information or login details into the TV itself. LG says it uses network isolation to maintain privacy between hotel rooms, and that your connection will be maintained for the duration of your stay but severed upon checkout.  Some hotels, including Hyatt , already offer Cast through customized hospitality Chromecast hardware. LG has instead included casting directly into the TV, with no additional hardware required. “Many hotel guests nowadays wish to stream their fav...

Vodafone has made what it calls “the world’s first” satellite video call using a standard smartphone, in a test of a system it says will provide mobile broadband service to 4G and 5G phones without dedicated satellite hardware. The service, using satellites from SpaceX rival AST SpaceMobile, is expected to launch in Europe before the end of 2025. AT&T and Verizon have also cut deals with Texas-based AST SpaceMobile to provide satellite-to-smartphone services across the US. The company has received FCC approval to begin testing its US-based coverage for AT&T this spring, meaning a full rollout is likely to lag behind Europe. Last year SpaceX demonstrated its own Starlink satellite-based video call between two US-based employees using “unmodified mobile phones.” That means Vodafone’s effort may not quite be a world-first, though unlike SpaceX it made the call from a remote area that apparently has no existing cell service. For Vodafone’s demonstration, an engineer (and, ...

If you use Comcast Xfinity internet, your FaceTime calls might be about to get better. Instead of bumping up the amount of data that your internet connection can send or receive at one time (usually called bandwidth or throughput), a new upgrade is coming to reduce the amount of time it takes for each packet of information to make the trip.  Comcast is officially starting to roll out the “pioneering new, ultra-low lag connectivity experience” to cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Philadelphia, Rockville (in Maryland), and San Francisco. (Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge ’s parent company.) The technology powering this upgrade is based on a standard called L4S , which stands for “Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput.” My former colleague Mitchell Clark has a thorough explainer of what L4S is supposed to do, but the intention is that the tech can significantly reduce latency so that things like video games are smoother and video c...

Nvidia’s new RTX 5080 graphics card isn’t as exciting as I was hoping it would be. While the sleek new Founders Edition redesign dramatically shrinks the size of the card compared to the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super , you’re getting the same 16GB of VRAM and only small performance improvements over the previous generation of cards. The RTX 5080, which arrives January 30th for $999, is about 15 percent faster than the RTX 4080 at 4K without the use of any AI-powered upscaling tricks. While the RTX 4080 managed to beat the RTX 3090 , and the RTX 3080 dethroned the RTX 2080 Ti , the RTX 5080 isn’t enough to topple the RTX 4090. Nvidia has built up an expectation that the 80-series card will surpass the previous generation’s flagship, and that’s simply not the case this time around.  The RTX 5080 does comfortably beat its only competition at this price point: the $999 AMD RX Radeon 9700 XTX . That makes the RTX 5080 a good card for 4K if you’re willing to drop settings...

Users should be able to browse more freely. albeit with a slower connection. | Image: NordVPN NordVPN has announced a new NordWhisper protocol that makes it easier to bypass networks that typically block VPN connections. The protocol operates differently from traditional VPN traffic patterns that can sometimes be detected by network administrators, and should provide a “smoother and more consistent browsing experience” in environments with restrictive internet security filters, such as airports, cafes, offices, and schools. The protocol is based on web tunnel technology that disguises hidden connection behaviors as ordinary internet traffic. The privacy-focused Tor Project introduced a similar bridging tech for its Tor Browser in March 2024. The mimicry makes it harder for advanced network filters to recognize VPN encryptions, but NordVPN says that the NordWhisper protocol “may work slower” than traditional VPN connections, and so should only be used when those are being blocked...

Sucking in data you didn’t ask permission for? Sounds familiar. Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek disrupted Silicon Valley with the release of cheaply developed AI models that compete with flagship offerings from OpenAI — but the ChatGPT maker suspects they were built upon OpenAI data. OpenAI and Microsoft are investigating whether the Chinese rival used OpenAI’s API to integrate OpenAI’s AI models into DeepSeek’s own models, according to Bloomberg . The outlet’s sources said Microsoft security researchers detected that large amounts of data were being exfiltrated through OpenAI developer accounts in late 2024, which the company believes are affiliated with DeepSeek. OpenAI told the Financial Times that it found evidence linking DeepSeek to the use of distillation — a common technique developers use to train AI models by extracting data from larger, more capable ones. It’s an efficient way to train smaller models at a fraction of the more than $100 millio...

TikTok is mostly back online after briefly going dark in the US to comply with the divest-or-ban law that went into effect on January 19th. On January 20th, Donald Trump issued an executive order “instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today.” However, Google and Apple have not yet restored TikTok or the other ByteDance apps that were removed back to the App Store or Google Play. A message from TikTok on Sunday said it’s “…in the process of restoring service” while thanking President-elect Donald Trump “for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties” for bringing back the app. Read on for all the latest news on the TikTok ban law in the US. Marvel Snap is back in the App Store. Trump denies working with Oracle and others on a TikTok deal. Oracle and Microsoft are reportedly in talks to take over TikTok Marvel Snap is coming back to app stores soon, say...

The Apple Watch Series 10 is the biggest and brightest you can buy without paying hundreds more for the Ultra. | photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge With a redesigned casing, a bigger display, and faster charging, the Apple Watch Series 10 is a fantastic upgrade opportunity for anyone who, like me, is more than a few iterations behind. If you’re in the same boat, you might consider jumping on a deal from Amazon , Best Buy, and Walmart that takes the 42mm version of the smartwatch down to $329 ($70 off), which matches the record low from Black Friday. The 46mm Series 10 is also on sale for $359 ($70 off) at Amazon , Best Buy , and Walmart , which is also its best price to date. The Apple Watch Series 10’s wide-angle displays are only one millimeter bigger than their Series 9 counterparts , but it’s a noticeable difference. The displays are also 40 percent brighter, while the overall package is a hair thinner. The Series 10 still doesn’t last more than a day as it...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Some Slack users are finding that their notifications aren’t showing up on the platform this morning, or that their corresponding messages are harder to find than usual. A few of my colleagues are reporting similar issues on The Verge’ s Slack channels, and I’ve been receiving repeated notifications for thread messages that I’ve already marked as read. The issues also seem to be affecting tags for other users — if a colleague hasn’t responded to your pings, DM them directly for now. Slack is aware that “notifications may be missing for some users” and logged an incident report at 7:52AM ET today, later confirming that the issue is impacting threads. “We’re currently investigating the issue and we’ll be back when we have more information,” Slack announced on its status page. “We’re sorry for any interruption to your day.” It’s unclear what’s causing the disruption to notifications or how many Slack users have been impacted. There’s a visible...

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Ciena One of the biggest tech companies you’ve never heard of is helping you listen to this podcast.  Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/v5kFfKI

The market value of US AI companies is taking a tumble. | Image: DeepSeek A chatbot made by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in the US this week, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app. The eponymous AI assistant is powered by DeepSeek’s open-source models, which the company says can be trained at a fraction of the cost using far fewer chips than the world’s leading models. Shares for Nvidia, the biggest global supplier of advanced AI chips, are currently down over 12 percent in pre-market training, Downloads for the app exploded shortly after DeepSeek released its new R1 reasoning model on January 20th, which is designed for solving complex problems and reportedly performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks. R1 was built on the V3 LLM DeepSeek released in December, which the company claims is on par with GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet , and cost less than $6 million to...

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Whenever Netflix raises its prices — which seems to happen roughly as often as Ben Affleck falls in love with an A-list celebrity — the company always gives the same reason. It needs the extra money, you see, in order to keep investing in the kind of programming and product its 302 million subscribers demand. That’s how the standard monthly price of ad-free Netflix jumped from $7.99 to $17.99 over the course of the last 13 years , including a $2.50 jump just announced during the company’s recent earnings report. There’s still a $7.99 monthly plan, of course, but that one includes ads — and it’s a dollar more expensive than it was a week ago. But let’s be real with each other. You want to know why Netflix keeps raising its prices ? Because it can. Because Netflix won. The rest of the streaming industry is competing ferociously over a finite pool of money, dealing with carriage disputes because of dwindling subscriber numbers, and panicking o...

It can feel magical when it works, but often Live AI feels more like Captain Obvious. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Live AI is neat, but the problem is knowing when (and why ) you’d want to use it. Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/It3gKbA

The Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge It might be time for a more unified platform. Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/pPtlQRU

It’s all about the vibes. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge There are a lot — and I mean a LOT — of fitness trackers out there, many of which can provide a surprising amount of insight into your health and fitness. That being said, the bare-bones Casio WS-B1000 , which is currently on sale at Amazon and Walmart for an all-time low of $39.10 (about $17 off), is not exactly one of them. At its core, the WS-B1000 is a lightweight wristwatch with some basic smarts, retro styling, and a few different color options. There’s no optical heart rate monitor or fancy-schmancy OLED display, though it does boast an onboard accelerometer for tracking your steps, up to two years of battery life on a single CR2016 coin cell battery, and Bluetooth for pairing it with your phone. Doing so lets you view a basic activity log in the Casio app while ensuring you always have the correct time on hand (a wild concept, I know). You get some basic wristwatch functionality as well — inclu...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge From reading in the bath to scribbling notes in the margins, from diving into the Amazon ecosystem to avoiding it outright, there’s an e-reader for everyone. Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/dOysNnW

Image: Letibus Design and Icedrop Games At a glance, Lok Digital seems like another cute and clever word game, a perfect distraction to keep on your phone for idle moments. But look closer, and it’s clear something just isn’t right. Yes, it’s a game about creating words to fill out a puzzle board. Except those words aren’t actually real — and they all have special powers. Think of it like an alien take on Scrabble. It takes a while to wrap your head around, but Lok ’s surreal setup makes for an excellent brain-scratching puzzler. There is actually a story of sorts here. Lok takes place in a black-and-white fantasy realm, and your goal is to help little worm-like creatures progress through each level. The stages are grids of squares, and your goal is to turn each one black. (I have no idea how this helps the creatures move, but just stay with me here.) You turn them black by placing letters to spell out words. Completed words will black out squares, and certain words also have the...

The $150 RGB laptop stand can keep any laptop cool, and on a few Razer Blade 16 gaming laptops, it can even improve 1080p performance. Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/zJ1PME8

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft says it’s shutting down its UK “experience center” in London next month, nearly six years after it first opened as a 21,000-square-foot Microsoft store. “To better align with its focus on digital growth, Microsoft has decided to exit the lease at the Microsoft Experience Centre in London early,” says an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to Windows Central . The store originally opened in July 2019, just months before the pandemic lockdowns began. Microsoft then quickly transitioned it to an “experience center” alongside closing its stores in the US in 2020 . I visited the London flagship store for its opening day, at a time when the company had more than 80 retail stores worldwide. The big, bold, and British store included Surface devices on every floor, HoloLens headsets, a big Xbox gaming lounge, and even a real-life McLaren Senna sports car that you could sit in and play Forza . It was quite the venue, set in the heart of ...