Technology news

Remember that time the internet set a video of Dragonite and Charizard dancing to a bunch of pop songs? Yeah, that was last August! What a great time that was for everybody. Anyway, I want you to forget about what you saw, because dancing pokémon are over. Here is your new bust-a-move meme, Dancing Winnie The Pooh. I’ve capped his entire title here to emphasis how important this is.
The original video was published on YouTube January 25th, 2015, and features the honey-loving, bumbli

Apple earlier today reported earnings for its first fiscal quarter of 2017, which included the holiday season, and had good things to say about iPhone sales, Mac revenue, and, perhaps surprisingly, the Apple Watch.Borrowing a page from Amazon, which famously boasts of increases in device sales without giving any kind of baseline, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that the Apple Watch set records “both [in] units and revenue” without going into specific details.“The holiday de

New York City plans to invest heavily in body cameras over the next two years. Today, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with Commissioner James O’Neill, announced that the city’s entire police force will wear body cameras by the end of 2019. De Blasio tweeted that the city reached an agreement with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association that ultimately pushed this initiative forward. He says both taxpayers and officers are “making contributions,” but it’s unclea

Satellite operator Iridium announced today that five of its Iridium NEXT satellites will share a ride to space with two NASA satellites. The seven probes will launch on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets in early 2018. It’s the eighth Falcon 9 launch that Iridium has contracted from SpaceX, and the first rideshare to space for the communications company. The NASA satellites going along for the ride are two GRACE-FO spacecraft — built with the GFZ German Research Center for Geosci

Apple set a new record for iPhones sales this quarter, selling 78.3 million units and bringing in more than $54 billion in revenue. But it set another record as well, in a metric closely watched by investors and analysts: average selling price (ASP). The average iPhone purchased last quarter was $695, a rise of $4 over the same quarter last year.It’s the highest ever for the iPhone, possibly driven by higher demand for Apple’s larger “Plus” phones, as well as a new 128GB

 Apple just released its first quarterly earnings report of the new year, and the company was quick to share that it was a banner quarter for the company’s Services segment which topped $7.17 billion, growing 18 percent year-over-year from $6.05 billion in Q1 of 2016. “Revenue from Services grew strongly over last year, led by record customer activity on the App Store, and we… Read More

 With another big holiday quarter behind it, Apple saw revenues from its flagship iPhone product rise to $54.4 billion, up from $51.6 billion a year earlier. That revenue growth came as Apple reported units sold rose 5 percent to 78.3 million in its fiscal first quarter of 2017. That was a record for sales, and also beat analysts expectations by a couple of million. Wall Street forecast… Read More

Apple just reported strong financial results for the first quarter of 2017. “We’re thrilled to report that our holiday quarter results generated Apple’s highest quarterly revenue ever, and broke multiple records along the way. We sold more iPhones than ever before and set all-time revenue records for iPhone, Services, Mac, and Apple Watch,” said CEO Tim Cook. “Revenue from Services grew strongly over last year, led by record customer activity on the App Store, and w

President Donald Trump will announce his nominee for the Supreme Court tonight on Facebook Live at 8PM ET. The White House announced the stream today on Twitter.CNN reported earlier today that Trump’s top two picks for the position, Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, have both been brought to Washington. An unnamed source told the publication that the White House is attempting to keep the nomination a secret and build suspense until the official announcement; another anonymous source said t

Okay, so I know these are times when people want to hear positive news — uplifting news — that can make us all feel better about the weeks and months to come. I also realize that reminding everyone that Michael Bolton has a tongue-in-cheek Valentine’s Day special coming to Netflix next month is probably not going to do that. But hey, facts are facts: Michael Bolton has a tongue-in-cheek Valentine’s Day special coming to Netflix next month.
Thankfully, it’s not the o

Google’s Chromium project lets developers poke around, test, and modify Google’s open-source browser code. But up until today, Chrome for iOS’s code wasn’t included in the open-source repository. Now, however, the company is making it public. The code wasn’t kept with the rest of the Chromium Project because of how complicated it is to actually get Chrome to run on a mobile Apple device.All iOS browsers have to be built on top of WebKit, so in order to include Chrom

Open-world games get a lot of flack. The genre is popular for offering massive and beautiful worlds, but that scale can come at the expense of story. And at first glance, it's easy to mistake Horizon Zero Dawn for another of those seemingly empty games.
But after four hours spent demoing the opening segments of the game, I can say that it’s a surprisingly story-driven game that feels more like a more fleshed-out Rise of the Tomb Raider than a reskinned Assassins Creed. Furthermore, while t

Starting today, Comcast is letting its customers use a Roku as a secondary cable box. If you’ve got a Roku streaming device “released in the last couple years” — or a Roku TV — you can download the Xfinity TV app beta from the Roku store and give the experience a test run before it widely launches later this year.Eventually the plan is to let customers replace their cable box (but not a cable subscription, obviously) with a Roku if they so choose. But during the bet

Adoptly, the “Tinder for adoption” app that was suspended from Kickstarter earlier this month, wasn’t a real service after all.In an email sent to reporters this afternoon, Adoptly’s creators said it was in fact part of “an ongoing art project” by directors Ben Becker and Elliot Glass. The duo were also behind the fake app Pooper, which fooled a number of news sites into writing about a supposed “Uber for dog poop” last July.
Adoptly is from the sa

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild finally launches on March 3rd, but a second Zelda adventure will be traveling across North America this year. With Hyrule hype at an all-time high, it’s no surprise that Nintendo has licensed a bunch of Zelda content to Scrap, a company that runs “Escape the Room” events in California. Defenders of the Triforce is coming to US and Canadian cities through the summer, though the $50–$60 tickets have already sold out in a few locations

The United States Senate has confirmed Elaine Chao as President Trump’s transportation secretary by a vote of 93-6. Secretary Chao, nominated by the president back in November, has prior experience in a presidential cabinet as secretary of labor during all eight years of President George W. Bush’s term.
Secretary Chao will likely be involved in infrastructure investment and revitalization, a top priority of President Trump, and will oversee the rollout of self-driving car regulations

Following the election of Donald Trump and, most recently, the president’s ban on immigration from seven countries, the American Civil Liberties Union has received a surge in financial support from those in opposition to his policies. This past weekend alone, the ACLU received $24 million in online donations — six times more than its annual average, The Washington Post reports.
Now, it appears the organization is looking to startup accelerator Y Combinator to help turn some of its ne

Hot on the heels of its redesign from last week, Snapchat is back with another update to its app, adding the ability to make custom Snapcodes for websites. Like the original Snapcodes, which add a user on Snapchat when viewed in the app, the new Snapcodes will prompt users to open a website when people snap the image.It’s a subtle but powerful move on Snapchat’s part that will no doubt help further attract brands to use the popular ephemeral sharing network. Or, in other words, get r

For individuals seeking extra privacy online or trying to access geo-blocked content, a virtual private network (or VPN) can seem like an ideal fix. VPN applications protect users by encrypting internet traffic and routing it through different countries. That makes it harder for hackers to intercept your connection, and can also fool Netflix into thinking you're in a different country. However, these programs can also pose a risk to users.
A new analysis of nearly 300 Android VPNs found that 84

Team communication service Slack today announced a new product designed to help its software scale to organizations with tens of thousands of employees. It’s called Slack Enterprise Grid, and it’s essentially a rethinking of the core app. It takes new features, critical design changes, and other alterations that make Slack easier to use and more efficient for corporations that are large and sprawling.For those familiar with Slack, this new product doesn’t change much about how

Scientists at a Dutch zoo want to test Tinder on a female orangutan to study how the animals make their mating choices. The 11-year-old orangutan, called Samboja, lives in the Apenheul primate park in Apeldoorn. Scientists hope that by showing her images of potential mates on a touchscreen tablet they can observe how she responds and learn whether appearance alone has an effect on orangutans’ love life, according to The Guardian.
The four-year-old research program, called Tinder for Orangu

TwelveSouth is back with another useful Mac accessory today with the MagicBridge, a plastic shell that’s meant to hold Apple’s Magic Trackpad 2 and Magic Keyboard together — say, if you intend to move around a lot or want to use them as part of a home media center.The MagicBridge is a natural extension of TwelveSouth’s earlier MagicWand accessory for the older version of Apple’s trackpad and keyboard duo. But there’s also some smart design choices here: the Ma

In an interview last summer, Steve Bannon said that his website, Breitbart News, planned to open a Paris bureau ahead of France’s 2017 presidential elections. Following the election of Donald Trump in November, Reuters reported that Breitbart hoped to fuel a similar upset in France, in support of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, is now a top adviser in the Trump White House, and France’s elections are less than three months aw

Microsoft is currently finalizing its feature set for the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update. While the update contains many new changes and features, Microsoft is announcing its final improvements to its Edge browser for the Creators Update today. Like most of the overall Creators Update changes, there aren't any major additions to Microsoft Edge, but all the small tweaks add up.
Visually, the first changes you're bound to notice if you test the update early (or wait until April) are the tweak

Uber announced today its plan to join forces with German auto giant Daimler on the deployment of self-driving cars. The cars, along with the autonomous technology, will be manufactured by Daimler before being introduced into Uber’s ride-hailing network, the companies say.“Auto manufacturers like Daimler are crucial to our strategy because Uber has no experience making cars—and in fact, making cars is really hard,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in a blog post published Tue

Video game makers understand thousand (possibly millions) of 30-something fans are driven by an urge to recapture the simply days of their youth. Earlier this year, Nintendo rereleased its NES, which couldn’t stay on shelves, while a side-scrolling Mario game, Super Mario Run, debuted on mobile. We yearn for long weekends locked indoors, what can we say?
Now a company called Hyperkin is feeding the consumer appetite for retro video games with the debut of its X91 Controller for Xbox One an

Nintendo has just released an update for its debut mobile game Super Mario Run, which adds an “easy” mode for players who just want to relax and explore levels. Nintendo describes the mode as “pressure-free.” It’s not the only change designed to make the game less intimidating: the update also includes some tweaks to the “toad rally” mode, reducing the number of toads you lose when losing a race.
The update comes not long after Nintendo revealed that Sup

As Silicon Valley’s collective response to president Trump’s immigration ban continues to harden, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has chosen to personally speak out against the executive order, citing his own experiences as an immigrant and emphasizing that there’s “no place for bias or bigotry in any society.”
Nadella, who was born in India and later moved to the US to study computer science, said he has gone through American immigration system and reaped i

Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition became 2016’s hottest Christmas item in large part because of its simplicity. The tiny plug-and-play box is arguably the easiest way to play NES games on a modern television, doing so with minimal fuss. The hardware only plays 30 preinstalled games, and has no optional upgrades or system updates. It is as simple as it is limited. The Analogue Nt mini is a different kind of retro gaming device. Like the NES Classic, it’s a machine designed to play

Love’s a game and this year we’re playing. For the full rules and intellectual justification of The Verge Bachelor Fantasy League please see this explanatory post. For a little background on why this is poised to be the best-ever season of The Bachelor, see this essay by culture editor Chris Plante:
Lizzie Plaugic: Welcome to the fifth round of The Bachelor fantasy league, a cruel echo of the previous four rounds. Corrine and Taylor once again hijacked the spotlight by bickering and

Decisions are tough, especially when you’re forced to choose between two ridiculously cool, yet very different options. But since we enjoy putting you through the wringer, we’re gonna do it again and make the winner of this Choose Your DJI Drone Giveaway… well, choose their DJI Drone. The winner of this contest will have to make a hard decision — becoming the proud owner of an awesome, brand-new DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone… or the owner of equally awesome, equally br