Technology news

Photo by Brent Rose for The Verge GoPro’s new Hero 8 Black had the best first month of sales of any camera in the company’s history, according to third quarter financial results released Thursday. What’s more, GoPro says sales of the new camera were up 40 percent compared to the first month of Hero 7 Black sales in 2018 — the camera that set the company’s previous record. People have spent years guessing that the rise in smartphone photography would lead to GoPro&r

Octopus Interactive, a startup bringing an interactive TV and ad experience into Uber and Lyft rides, has raised a $10.3 million funding round led by Sinclair Digital Group.
Backseat TVs mixing show snippets and commercials have become a common part of the taxi experience in New York City and elsewhere. Octopus is offering something of a more interactive version of this concept to rideshare drivers, who can use it to keep their passengers entertained and also earn extra money.
Octopus says it pr

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Microsoft’s latest Surface hardware is now out in the world, and it’s clear that the biggest gamble that the company took with this year’s models — a move away from Intel’s market-dominating processors — hasn’t quite panned out.
The focus on non-Intel chips was a big part of Microsoft’s 2019 Surface announcement. The company went out of its way to highlight the new, co-engineered Ryzen Surface Edition pr

Disney+ will be available on Amazon Fire TV devices for the November 12th launch after all, according to The Wall Street Journal, following a WSJ report last month that said the streaming service may not be available on Amazon products due to a disagreement over advertising.
CEO Bob Iger announced the news on Disney’s fourth quarter earnings call, alongside news that Disney+ will also be available on LG and Samsung smart TVs. “We’re pleased to announce partnerships with Amazon

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’ve been holding out for a sale on the newly released Pixel 4, this upcoming Black Friday deal is worth the wait. Best Buy announced a heap of Black Friday deals earlier today. While you can grab some of those deals right now, others, like big savings on the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, will be available starting at 5PM on Thanksgiving Day, November 28th.
You’ll be able to get $400 off of the new Pixel 4 (which normally starts at $799) and the Pixe

The Verge The first time YouTube tried live-streaming, it failed. YouTube Gaming began in 2015, after Google tried and failed to buy Twitch, and as of this May the project was shuttered because it was confusing for users. “It was pretty bad. It could not have been worse, to be completely honest,” says the e-sports consultant and broadcaster Rod Breslau, when I reach him by phone. The failure knocked YouTube out of the race it had been in with Twitch to win the hearts and minds of th

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Disney’s final earnings call before the launch of its anticipated streaming service, Disney+, reminded investors that Disney is in a strong place, beating revenue estimates.
The company reported a quarterly revenue of $19.1 billion. It was estimated to pull in $19.04 billion. The company posted $2.32 billion in profit during this same quarter last year on $14.3 billion in revenue. Still, Disney’s numbers are almost up across the board, including a huge boo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Less than two months after TikTok came under fire for appearing to censor videos related to the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the app is facing a new challenge from the US government. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has contacted TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance with concerns that the app could pose a threat to US citizens.
Those concerns will most likely lead to a national security review — one

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Juul announced today that it will halt sales of its mint-flavored pods after recently released studies found the flavor was especially popular among young e-cigarette users.Juul previously halted the sale of its fruit flavors
In a statement citing the studies, Juul said it would immediately stop taking orders from retailers or selling the pods through Juul.com. The company previously halted the sale of fruit flavors, and it now offers only tobacco and men

Microsoft is detailing its plans for its popular OneNote app today. The software giant reversed course and revived its OneNote 2016 desktop app earlier this week, with a new dark mode and extended support. Microsoft has much deeper plans for this desktop app, and OneNote overall, though.“We are literally merging all of our modern code back into the legacy 2016 codebase to create a unified single codebase that we can ship and deliver OneNote from,” explained Ben Hodes, product manager

Images: General Motors General Motors teased the “future of hot rodding” this week with a stunning, if not necessarily novel idea: the automaker took a vintage 1962 Chevrolet C-10 pickup truck and turned it into an electric vehicle using technology from the Chevy Bolt.
The franken-truck, dubbed “E-10,” is not the only wonderful one-off oddity to come out of this year’s Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) trade show, which took place this week in Las Vegas

One of the most hotly anticipated electric bicycles scheduled to be released in 2020 isn’t from a traditional bike manufacturer, or even some new crowdfunding e-bike startup, but from one of the oldest motorcycle companies in the world. We’ve known for a few years now that Harley-Davidson is working on a whole lineup of battery-powered vehicles, including a motorcycle, several pedal-assist bikes, and a scooter-moped concept. This week, the company helped whet our appetites by sending

Bill Gates and Elizabeth Warren are tweeting at each other — and it seems possible they could have an IRL conversation soon.
But let’s first back up to why they’re @-ing each other. Yesterday, the Microsoft co-founder was interviewed at The New York Times’ DealBook Conference. The very first thing CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Gates was his position on Warren’s proposed 6 percent wealth tax on billionaires, which is designed to help pay for Medicare for All.
As

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple has just released iOS and iPadOS 13.2.2, with a fix for a frustrating bug that led apps to close in the background much quicker than usual. Even a jump between two apps could be enough for Safari windows to reload or to lose your place in a YouTube video. The issue is also fixed in the iOS 13.3 update that went into beta testing this week, but it’s great to see that Apple is fast-tracking a fix to all customers.iOS 13.2.2 also addresses an

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Alienware’s Area-51m came onto the laptop scene at the beginning of the year with a big promise: that you’d be able to upgrade nearly every component of the laptop, including the GPU. And this week, Alienware made good on the last part of that promise by releasing its first GPU upgrade kits for the Area-51m.
The new kits aren’t the biggest update: they’re essentially just the Nvidia RTX 2070 and 2080 GPUs that were already offered on the

Adobe is developing live-streaming features that are built directly into its Creative Cloud apps, the company announced at its annual Adobe Max creativity conference. A beta version of the feature is currently available to a whitelisted group of users on Adobe Fresco. The feature gives users the option to go live and share a link for anyone online to watch and comment on their streams.
Chief product officer Scott Belsky compared the experience to Twitch but with an educational component that cou

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Thursday, T-Mobile CEO John Legere announced that, if his company’s merger with Sprint closes, the New T-Mobile would roll out a program to help provide children across the country with greater access to the internet and close the “homework gap.”
T-Mobile is calling it “Project 10 Million,” and it aims to provide 10 million households with free access to the internet. It’s a $10 billion commitment from the proposed N

YouTube YouTube is launching a new homepage design today that will include bigger thumbnails, which is a move that frustrated people when the company first tested the refreshed look in August.
Users will see fewer videos on the homepage because of the bigger thumbnails, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to The Verge. The representative added that people are being presented with more information about each video they’re seeing, though. Allowing videos to have more physical space on the page

Google has upgraded its Teachable Machine, an in-browser web experiment it originally released in 2017 to teach people some basic principles of machine learning.The original version of the app was really just a fun little experiment that could be used to classify visual data from your webcam. (I taught it to identify my houseplants!) But Google has added new modes to the system along with the option to export trained models, making Teachable Machine 2.0 a more functional system for building actu

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Something strange is happening with text messages in the US right now. Overnight, a multitude of people received text messages that appear to have originally been sent on or around Valentine’s Day 2019. These people never received the text messages in the first place; the people who sent the messages had no idea that they had never been received, and they did nothing to attempt to resend them overnight.
It’s unclear right now what the prob

Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Best Buy has shared its Black Friday ad, and one of the big surprises was that some of its best deals are already happening. If you’re a My Best Buy member (Best Buy’s free membership service), you can save a lot of money today on the new seventh-generation iPad. You can also save on various sizes and storage configurations of the 2018 iPad Pro.But you don’t have to be a My Best Buy member to take advantage of some big sales that we didn’t think

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Uber has admitted that it may either have to come to a licensing agreement with Waymo or make design changes to its autonomous vehicle technology, following an independent investigation into its self-driving tech, Reuters reports. The disclosure came in Uber’s 10-Q filing earlier this week.
The investigation is the result of a settlement Uber reached with Waymo back in February 2018 after the Alphabet-owned company sued Uber over alleged theft of it

T-Mobile has announced a new T-Mobile Connect wireless plan that’s now the cheapest plan the carrier offers: $15 per month for unlimited talk, text, and 2GB of data.That price includes access to 5G data, although you’ll likely burn through that 2GB pretty quickly on 5G. There’s also a $25-per-month plan that offers 5GB of data. Use up that allotment, though, and you’ll need to pay for more (instead of getting dropped down to slower speeds, which is what happens on the &ld

T-Mobile has announced a new T-Mobile Connect wireless plan that’s would be the cheapest plan the carrier offers: $15 per month for unlimited talk, text, and 2GB of data. The catch? T-Mobile is only planning to offer the deal if its planned Sprint deal goes though.That price includes access to 5G data, although you’ll likely burn through that 2GB pretty quickly on 5G. There’s also a $25-per-month plan that offers 5GB of data. Use up that allotment, though, and you’ll need