Technology news

Image: Apple Apple’s new Goldman Sachs-backed credit card launched to all US iPhone users just yesterday, and now we’re learning all sorts of fun facts about the physical, titanium card the company is shipping to likely thousands of users at this very moment. Namely, that it can be easily damaged. Thanks to a support webpage unearthed by MacRumors, Apple is advising against keeping your Apple Card in a leather wallet or in direct contact with denim, as such fabrics “might caus

Splunk, the publicly traded data processing and analytics company, today announced that it has acquired SignalFx for a total price of about $1.05 billion. Approximately 60% of this will be in cash and 40% in Splunk common stock. The companies expect the acquisition to close in the second half of 2020.
SignalFx,which emerged from stealth in 2015, provides real-time cloud monitoring solutions, predictive analytics and more. Upon close, Splunk argues, this acquisition will allow it to become a lead

The Google Play Store is getting a fresh new look, which, like most of Google’s redesigns of late, nixes the colorful green header in favor of a brighter and whiter style. (The Gmail app similarly lost its red header earlier this year as part of the same Material Design revamp.)
Bright and white
Like the iOS App Store — which got a similar redesign two years ago — the new Play Store now has separate tabs for apps, games, books, and another for movies and TV shows. The tab bar w

Nearly 200 startups have just graduated from the prestigious San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator . The flock of companies are now free to proceed company-building with a fresh $150,000 check and three-months full of tips and tricks from industry experts.
As usual, we sent several reporters to YC’s latest demo day to take notes on each company and pick our favorites. But there were many updates to the YC structure this time around and new trends we spotted from the ground that we

Warning: This essay contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Interviews with the filmmakers behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe almost always get around to what seems to be the studio’s core creative ethos: paint yourself into a corner, then find a creative way to get out of it. That mission statement inspired the snap in Avengers: Infinity War and the big secret-identity reveal that ends Spider-Man: Far From Home. And while creative inspiration probably wasn

Dell has announced a refresh of its XPS 13 laptop ahead of IFA 2019, and each configuration will be built with Intel’s new U-series Comet Lake 10th Gen processors. The most affordable model starts at $899 and features the Intel Core i3-10110U. Dell will offer a high-end model with the souped-up hexacore Intel Core i7-10710U CPU beginning in October.All XPS 13 configurations use LPDDR3 Dual-Channel SDRAM, which is slightly disappointing since Intel’s new 10th Gen CPUs support faster L

X-Box One S | Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge Microsoft contractors have listened to voice recordings captured by the Xbox One console, according to Motherboard. The practice dates back to the early days of the Xbox One when it could be controlled with voice commands directed at the optional Kinect camera accessory, and it continued after Microsoft added its more advanced Cortana voice assistant to the console.Motherboard spoke to several contractors who could listen to these Xbox recordings.

Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images President Donald Trump is reportedly “enraged” that Ford, Volkswagen, BMW, and Honda struck a deal with California to steadily reduce the amount of pollution emitted by their new cars, according to The New York Times. The deal directly contradicts (and potentially threatens) one of the cornerstone efforts of his administration: an attempt to roll back even higher standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama.Trump repor

Samsung Samsung knows some people don’t buy its phones because doing so means committing themselves to becoming a green bubble person in their iPhone friends’ texts. Samsung feels for these people, so it launched an entire Giphy page filled with comeback GIFs they can send to self-righteous iPhone users.
For the green bubble unacquainted, many iOS users don’t enjoy texting Android users because Apple treats SMS, MMS, and RCS messages differently than iMessages. All sorts of iM

Google will let G Suite customers continue to use Hangouts until next year, delaying a shutdown of the service that was supposed to begin in October. Hangouts will now stay around for business customers until at least next June.
The shutdown will move customers of Google’s business-focused G Suite subscription over to a pair of new chat services: Hangouts Chat, a Slack competitor; and Hangouts Meet, a video conferencing service. While the services generally include the same functionality (

Photo: Warner Bros. On August 20th, social media was suddenly abuzz with the official announcement that Lana Wachowski, half of the sibling team behind the original Matrix trilogy, is officially making a fourth Matrix movie with original stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. The announcement instantly sparked fervid speculation: where could a fourth Matrix movie even go since the trilogy-capper, 2003’s The Matrix Revolutions, killed off Reeves and Moss’ characters and seemingly e

Twitter’s ongoing, long-term efforts to make conversations easier to follow and engage with on its platform is getting a boost with the company’s latest acquihire. The company has picked up the team behind Lightwell, a startup that had built a set of developer tools to build interactive, narrative apps, for an undisclosed sum. Lightwell’s founder and CEO, Suzanne Xie, is becoming a director of product leading Twitter’s Conversations initiative, with the rest of her s

Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto via Getty Images YouTube is being pressured to remove ads from China Central Television, a state media channel that’s allegedly spreading misinformation about protesters in Hong Kong.Users on Twitter and Reddit have posted a number of screenshots of the ads, many of which paint the Hong Kong protests as an illegitimate product of foreign influence. The users accuse YouTube and parent company Google of enabling an “infestation of ads” that “tries to s

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In 2016, the ad tech company AppNexus took a stand against hate speech. Just two weeks after the election of Donald Trump, CEO Brian O’Kelley announced he was dropping service to Breitbart. A string of articles on Muslim immigrants and female genital mutilation had been beyond the pale, O’Kelley said, leaving him no choice but to cut ties with the then-prominent right-wing site.
AppNexus specializes in technology for auctioning online ads, whi

Photo by Judy Griesdieck / Star Tribune A combination of extreme heat and high humidity levels — commonly referred to as the “heat index” or the “feels like” temperature you see on your weather app — is increasingly placing athletes at risk as global average temperatures rise, according to a report released on August 21st by environmental science and news organization Climate Central. It studied data from 239 US cities and found that 83 percent of them have e

Intel has introduced a slate of new processors to add to its 10th Gen lineup. Today’s announcement focuses on its Comet Lake CPUs, resulting in even more Y- and U-series CPUs to decipher.All eight of these new 10th Gen processors use Intel’s 14nm process, not Ice Lake’s 10nm process. That doesn’t make these bad, per se. Notably, the new Intel Core i7-10710U is its first hexacore U-series processor, and it features 12 threads and a higher max clock speed than some of Intel

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Sony’s Xperia XZ2 Compact, the company’s small flagship phone introduced in early 2018, is just $250 right now at B&H Photo. This device, which comes in silver, usually sells for around $500. If you’re looking for an unlocked phone with capable specs and support for Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, this is a great deal.
The XZ2 Compact has a five-inch, 2160 x 1080 display, making it a good fit if you prefer smaller phones. It ships with Andr

THX’s long-running “bwonnnnnnnnnnnnnng” Deep Tone sound that plays before movies just got a lavish new update.
It’s still recognizable to cinephiles, but the version heard in the trailer above is much crisper than the original tone that played before Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi in 1983. There have been more than 20 remixed versions of the tone since then, including special versions made for The Simpsons and Shrek. Everyone knows it! It’s a meme! People

JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images While I paged through Ninja’s first book — with its few words sandwiched between high-gloss promotional photos and charts — I got the distinct feeling that I was consuming something from the future. The book, Get Good: My Ultimate Guide to Gaming, is itself gamified; it has a progress bar, for example, near the page numbers that’s akin to the one under most videos online. The text is big and pops, as they say, and the pages are broken up

Famous actors and musicians, the head of the US Department of Energy, and regular Instagram users have been spreading a hoax memo that claims the company will soon have permission to make deleted photos and messages public and use those posts against them in court.
The claims are fake and the assertions don’t make a lot of sense, but that hasn’t stopped it from being spread by some major names concerned about the implications. Celebrities including Usher, Judd Apatow, and Julia Rober

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The data collected by self-driving cars used to be a closely guarded secret. But recently, many companies developing autonomous driving systems have begun to release their data to the research community in dribs and drabs. The latest to do so is Waymo, the self-driving unit of Alphabet, which today is making some of the high-resolution sensor data gathered by its fleet of autonomous vehicles available to researchers.Waymo says its dataset contains 1,000 driving