Latest Technology

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 ...

Annoyed by fake reviews on business pages? So is the CMA. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant’s reviews platform. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them. This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews, and deleting all existing reviews for at least six months if they repeatedly engage in suspicious review activity. Google will also place prominent “warning alerts” on the Google profiles of businesses using fake reviews to help consumers be more aware of potentially misleading feedback. Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews on UK business pages will be banned and have their review history de...

The WH-1000XM5s launched almost three years ago. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge It’s been three long years since Sony launched its flagship WH-1000XM5 headphones, our pick for the best wireless headphones for most people , so we’re due a follow-up — and a regulatory filing indicates that the XM6 cans might nearly be ready to launch. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filing hints at a slight redesign, including a new hinge and what appear to be detachable earpads. The Walkman Blog first spotted the filing , which includes a product diagram showing off some of the details of the right earcup. Most interestingly, the diagram shows the earpad lifting off to reveal the location of the “user-visible name plate” containing the model and serial numbers. Since the FCC requires this name plate be accessible to users, it seems likely that the pad is attached without screws, though we don’t know if that’s with clips, magnets, or something else. The XM5s hid their FCC details ...

The next-gen GPU battle begins with Nvidia alone at the top. Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/u6qD1Wy

Image: Cadillac After months of teases, Cadillac officially announced the Lyriq-V as a 615-horsepower, high-performance electric SUV that will go on record as the “quickest” vehicle ever produced by the luxury automaker. With that much horsepower, and 650 pound-feet of torque, Cadillac says the Lyriq-V is able to leap from zero to 60mph in just 3.3 seconds — besting the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing’s acceleration by a tenth of a second. That may not sound like much, but when you consider that the CT5-V Blackwing is lauded as one of the most expertly engineered American cars ever made , and when you realize that the CT5-V Blackwing is likely the last of its kind, you start to see the significance of the Lyriq-V’s performance specs. Of course, there’s some fine print to consider. That acceleration time is measured on a closed course, using the Lyriq-V’s Velocity Max that’s also available on Cadillac’s forthcoming EV lineup that includes the Vistiq , Optiq , and Escalade IQ . And i...

Image: Paramount Plus Paramount Plus’ new Star Trek film is the sound of scene chewing in space, which is to say, it’s pretty damn fun. As the very first nontheatrical Star Trek feature (one that’s debuting almost a decade after Star Trek Beyond ), Star Trek: Section 31 seems like the sort of project that could have easily felt too “made for TV” to tell a satisfying story that does its characters justice. But Section 31 is firing on just about all of its cylinders, and even though Discovery is behind us at this point, the movie charts an exciting new course for Star Trek ’s potential future. Michelle Yeoh was an icon long before Star Trek: Discovery , but her performance as Captain Philippa Georgiou was part of what reenergized her career and put her on track to win a much-deserved Oscar in 2023. Though Discovery changed after Yeoh’s exit in season 3, there was hope that Georgiou’s story might continue on when news first broke about CBS being interested in another spinoff ser...

Seems like a good solution for folks who are too lazy to title their video files. | Image: Adobe Search in Premiere Pro has been updated with AI-powered visual recognition, allowing users to find videos by describing the contents of the footage. It’s just one of several quality-of-life features Adobe is adding to Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Frame.io that aim to save video editors time on their projects. Users can enter search terms like “a person skating with a lens flare” to find corresponding clips within their media library. Adobe says the media intelligence AI can automatically recognize “objects, locations, camera angles, and more,” alongside spoken words — providing there’s a transcript attached to the video. The feature doesn’t detect audio or identify specific people, but it can scrub through any metadata attached to video files, which allows it to fetch clips based on shoot dates, locations, and camera types. The media analysis runs on-device, so doesn’t require an...

In development for several years, Zigbee ambient sensing could turn existing Zigbee-powered lights, switches, and plugs into motion sensors. | Image: Ivani Lights that turn on when you walk into a room and turn off when you leave are one of the most desirable smart home features. But you need to buy additional hardware like motion sensors to make this “magic” happen. A new ambient sensing technology called Sensify could make this easier by turning your light bulbs into motion sensors. And it might be landing on a Philips Hue bridge near you very soon. “There are tens of millions of devices with the base firmware already out there; we’re just working on the final touches to light up the full experience.” Sensify is a wireless network sensing (WNS) technology developed by Ivani that can turn mains-powered Zigbee devices into motion sensors for controlling your lights with just a firmware update — no additional hardware needed. The best part is that it can work on devices alrea...

I want to use this feature just to side-eye Gemini. | Image: Google Google is announcing a variety of classroom and accessibility-focused ChromeOS features today, and one of the standouts is being able to control your computer with your head and facial expressions. The feature — aimed at those with motor impairments — was first announced in early December , but it’s now rolling out to more users with compatible Chromebooks (Google recommends 8GB of RAM or more). This isn’t Google’s first foray into the face-as-a-cursor space. It previously made an open-source AI accessibility tool for Windows games called Project Gameface , which was also announced for Android . Here’s a sample video from Google of the tech in action, demoed by software engineer Amanda Lin Dietz who helped develop it. Additionally, Google is also teasing a boatload of new Chromebooks for 2025, with over 20 new devices in its standard Chromebook and Chromebook Plus lines coming this year. That estimate may be ...