Technology news

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The new 16-inch MacBook Pro finally righted Apple’s keyboard debacle, and it’s a beast of a machine in terms of performance. But early buyers have still managed to uncover some bugs with the latest MacBook Pro — and one hardware characteristic that might put off some people.As noted by AppleInsider (and backed by this long MacRumors forum thread), owners of the 16-inch MacBook Pro are complaining about an intermittent “popping&

Google Fiber is phasing out its lower-priced 100 Mbps internet access plan, opting to offer only the core gigabit-speed plan to new users. Google announced the decision yesterday, saying customers had “caught on to our early vision” for super-fast internet. The 100 Mbps option cost $50 per month, while the 1,000 Mbps alternative actually doesn’t cost much more; it’s remained at $70 per month (with no data cap) since Google Fiber launched in 2012.
That’s a pretty goo

Generation Z has taken over Tinder, and they care more about causes like climate change than they do about posting adventurous vacation shots, according to a “Year in Swipe” report Tinder released today.
Unlike their millennial counterparts, Tinder’s report says that their younger users — the majority of people on Tinder are now under age 25 — are more likely to mention a cause or mission they’re passionate about on their profile. When it comes to what they&rs

It is perhaps an understatement to say that Twitter is often a bad place to be on the internet in 2019. But what if there were a place where with only good tweets? That’s the idea behind Twitter’s latest effort, @TwitterRetweets, a new account that aims to highlight the best of Twitter. Per the account description, Twitter Retweets will provide followers with “Your best Tweets. Retweeted.”In many ways, Twitter Retweets is an extension of Twitter’s recent marketing e

For its 10th anniversary in October, Riot announced a number of new initiatives meant to expand the League of Legends universe, including a fighting game, mobile spinoff, animated series, and others. But there are plenty more in the works. Today, Riot announced a brand-new publishing label, which will see the developer partner with smaller studios to create even more League of Legends games. In fact, multiple titles are already in development, though Riot isn’t ready to announce specific g

Photo by Noam Galai/WireImage Michael Bloomberg temporarily had a tiny but extremely questionable advantage in the 2020 presidential race: if you typed “Mike” into one of his company’s roughly 325,000 news terminals around the globe, you were redirected to his campaign site, reported the Financial Times.
The FT made this GIF, so you can see for yourself just how fully that query thrust you into Bloomberg’s candidacy:Apparently, the FT’s story caused the former New

Qualcomm Qualcomm just announced a new virtual and augmented reality platform, and it’s working with Niantic — the company behind games like Ingress and Pokémon Go — on a smart glasses reference design. The Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 platform is a follow-up to the earlier XR1 platform, and, like its predecessor, it’s specifically designed for AR and VR hardware. But it now supports 5G connectivity as well as voice-based interaction, eye tracking, and passthrough came

Qualcomm has had big ambitions for ARM-powered Windows laptops for years. At its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit, the chipmaker revealed its biggest play yet: the Snapdragon 8c and the Snapdragon 7c, two new processors that are designed to create a new lineup of ARM chips for Windows laptops.The 8c is positioned as a replacement for the Snapdragon 850 processor, Qualcomm’s second-generation Windows ARM chip. The 7c is an entirely new entry-level product that’s meant to compete with bud

Like it does every year, Spotify today gave users a reminder of their past with its “Wrapped” year-in-review roundup. And it seems like everyone is sharing their top songs and artists from the last year on Instagram, Twitter, and other social networks — well, everyone but Apple Music listeners.
Spotify users can revisit their top artists of the year, top songs, and, because 2019 also marks the end of a decade, their most consumed music over the past 10 years. Conveniently, the

Clip Studio Paint, the industry-standard software for manga artists, is now available on the iPhone. Unlike the iPad version, which is just an identical clone of the desktop app ported over for the tablet, the iPhone app is optimized for smaller screens. It features cloud integration so that work on the iPhone will also sync with files on the desktop and iPad versions. There’s no word yet on when an Android version will arrive.
Celsys, the makers of Clip Studio Paint, is clear to point out

Mustafa Suleyman co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg.| Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images for TechCrunch The personnel changes at Alphabet continue, this time with Mustafa Suleyman — one of the three co-founders of the company’s influential AI lab DeepMind — moving to Google.
Suleyman announced the news on Twitter, saying that after a “wonderful decade” at DeepMind, he would be joining Google to work with the company’s head of AI J

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple has finally clarified a peculiar and unsettling privacy issue with its newer iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro models regarding location tracking. After security expert Brian Krebs revealed earlier this week that the latest iPhones request location data even when a user has toggled the appropriate privacy settings to avoid sharing that information, Apple is now telling TechCrunch that the culprit is its new ultra wideband technology. The company says

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but some pretty decent deals are popping up. The Google Nest Hub is $79 and comes with a free Google Nest Mini if you buy it from the Google Store or Target. That’s the same price the Nest Hub was during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and the Nest Mini was on sale for $20 (now $35).
Here’s another deal: you can get the third-generation Echo Dot bundled with two Phillips Hue smart light bulbs for $34.9

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A group of filmmakers have sued the US government for making visa applicants hand over details about their social media accounts. The lawsuit argues that the requirement unconstitutionally discourages applicants from speaking online — and, conversely, discourages people who post political speech from trying to enter the US.
The US government has ramped up social media surveillance as part of President Donald Trump’s “extreme vetting&

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Waymo’s robot taxi service in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, turns one year old on December 5th. To celebrate, the Alphabet company is taking a step toward wider expansion by making its ride-hailing app available in Apple’s App Store.Waymo’s app has been available to download from the Google Play Store since April 2019, which makes sense for a company spun out of Google back in 2016. Bringing the app to iOS, though, signals that the company i

The goal of YouTube’s new edition of Rewind, its annual video dedicated to the year’s biggest trends and creator moments, is to best last year’s by not ending up the most-downvoted video of all time or prompt a statement from the company’s CEO. That explains why Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg is back in Rewind, which was released today, after being notably absent for two years. His inclusion comes at the end of a controversial, but massive year for the creator, a

minecraft Fortnite may have dominated gaming conversations in 2019, but there’s one game that remained king on YouTube: Minecraft.YouTube unveiled viewership stats for some of its biggest games in 2019 in its new Rewind video, ranging from Roblox to Minecraft. Roblox videos brought in 29.6 billion views, Grand Theft Auto saw nearly 40 billion views, and Fortnite hit 60.9 billion views. Above all of those, however, sat Minecraft, which brought in a whopping 100.2 billion views. That’

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has a new research note predicting Apple’s next two years of iPhones, and there’s a wild new detail: Apple’s 2021 flagship iPhone will reportedly kill off the Lightning port, but USB-C fans (like myself) shouldn’t get too excited. According to Kuo’s note, Apple won’t replace the proprietary port with USB-C; rather, it will rely on an entirely wireless experience for charging and sync

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, reached a settlement on Wednesday with a group of parents who alleged that the company collected and exposed the data and personal information of minors, in violation of the children’s privacy law.
The plaintiff’s lawyer in the case, Gary Klinger, declined to comment about the details of the settlement with TikTok, but confirmed to The Verge that one had been reached. In a statement, a TikTok spokesper

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge The lack of a native audio recording app built into Google’s lean Android software has always brought a chuckle from people who use iOS. Google finally introduced the Google Recorder app with the Pixel 4, and it has now brought that app to a few older Pixel phones (via Android Police). If you own a Pixel 2, Pixel 3, or Pixel 3A, you can navigate to the Google Play Store and download the official Recorder app right now.
Frankly, there are a lot of recording

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has been leading up to launching a consumer version of its Microsoft 365 subscription for months. The Verge originally revealed that the company was planning a “for life” version of its Teams software earlier this year, and now ZDNet reports that the Microsoft 365 consumer subscription is currently named “M365 Life.”
These subscriptions will reportedly largely be a rebranding of what is currently known as Office 365 Perso

Photo by Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto via Getty Images As cellphones got smarter, they also became marginally more dangerous to the clumsy, easily distracted humans holding them, according to new research. Before phones came loaded with perilous pings from Twitter, read receipts, or news alerts, the researchers found, they posed less of a risk to the integrity of their users’ faces.
Around 2007 — the year the first iPhone was released — the number of head injuries caused by cellpho

There is a peculiar kind of alchemy that happens at the point where massive amounts of money and highly regarded artists converge: everything in the vicinity becomes meaningless. (Call it an existential voidout.) Snapchat and Gucci collaborated with respected filmmaker Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers, The Beach Bum) on a pair of Snapchat Spectacles — the connected glasses nobody used — exclusively for this year’s Miami Art Basel. And then Korine shot a short film with them. Her

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge PlayStation is the console family for Japanese role-playing games. As the de facto home for RPGs following the Super Nintendo era, it’s enjoyed everything from Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears, and Suikoden to Ni No Kuni and Kingdom Hearts. Twenty-five years after the launch of the original PlayStation, however, its greatest offering is also its most improved: the Persona series, created by Atlus.
The developer’s most recent entry in the franchise, Pers

Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images General Motors announced today that it was setting up a joint venture with South Korea’s LG Chem to mass-produce batteries for electric cars. The two companies plan to invest a total of $2.3 billion to build a new facility, which will be located in Lordstown, Ohio.The new plant will essentially become GM’s own Gigafactory, with an annual capacity of more than 30 gigawatt hours. The facility will manufacture battery cells for the 20 new electric veh

This afternoon, SpaceX is set to launch its Dragon cargo capsule, filled with nearly 5,700 pounds of cargo and supplies for the crew of the International Space Station. It’s SpaceX’s last resupply mission to the station for 2019. Following the flight, SpaceX will attempt one of its signature rocket landings, targeting a drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s atypical for SpaceX to do an ocean landing after a flight to the ISS. Normally, the company tries to land its Fa

Image: Imgur Twitch’s clips feature is one of the best ways for streamers to have their finest gaming moments go viral, and now, photo-sharing site Imgur is trying to get in on the action with Melee.
Melee is a new section for gaming content on Imgur. It’s meant to give players the ability to share their favorite gaming clips with other users and potentially bring attention to themselves in the process. Imgur has hundreds of millions of users who frequent the site, and they may diff

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you own an older Mac computer, wiping the hard drive to prep it for sale is simple. But for newer models, including the iMac Pro, the 2018 Mac mini, and all MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models released since 2018, the process of fully resetting them is more involved.That’s because of Apple’s new T2 security chip, which adds Activation Lock, another layer of security that makes things harder for thieves. That’s great and all, but if you forge

Qualcomm’s annual Hawaiian press event to announce its products for the coming year is happening. It‘s there in part because Qualcomm needs something equally convenient for Asian and American attendees and also because the company probably is still smarting from the reaction to its absolutely bonkers attempt to make CES its big annual keynote in 2013 (if you don’t know what I am referring to, you absolutely should click).
As I briefly mentioned yesterday, the main thing that st

Craigslist’s iOS app looks and feels like a straight copy of the website.There’s something about the brutal simplicity of Craigslist that’s always suggested an admirable caution. But even then you’d have to admit the company has been slow to get on the app game. Now, more than a decade after apps became A Thing with the App Store’s launch, Craigslist has finally has its own, available for iOS and in beta on Android.The iOS app at least follows the principles of Cra

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks before signing the White Houses Pledge To Americas Workers at El Centro Community College on October 3rd in Dallas | Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images The tech world has gone a long time since a day like Tuesday, where the industry’s tectonic plates shifted in a fashion sudden and dramatic enough to send newsrooms into momentary turmoil. Being sent into momentary turmoil is half the fun of being a reporter, of course, and so I didn’t even mind when I