Technology news

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Sony’s WH-1000XM3 over-ear, noise-canceling headphones have been some of the best on the market, with very good noise cancellation, the best sound of any of the WH-1000X series, and improved fit from previous versions. But it appears a new version of Sony’s wireless cans are on way, as filings for what appear to be the WH-1000XM4s just hit the FCC over the weekend.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can glean from the filings. Companies often

Photo by Stephen Brashear/Getty Images Boeing will suspend production of the 737 Max, the airplane that was involved in two fatal crashes that took the lives of 346 people, according to The Wall Street Journal and CNBC. The company has been making about 40 aircraft per month following the 737 Max’s worldwide grounding in March. It’s unclear how long the production halt will last.
Boeing had previously said it hoped to get the 737 Max back in the air by the end of 2019, but the recer

Since No Man’s Sky’s release in 2016, the game’s developers have been adding updates and new features — now there’s multiplayer, base building, and a virtual reality mode, among other things — that have kept the game fresh and kept players coming back. The latest addition is a fully featured audio application that players can use to make their own music for use in their planetary bases. It’s called the ByteBeat Device.
“ByteBeat formulas are made o

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge We’ve reached the final few days before the holidays, and before you know it, going to a local retailer — and dealing with mobs of people — will be your last resort for buying gifts on time. To avoid having that happen, we’d suggest buying items online as soon as you can.
Thankfully, several retailers are making those shopping duties cheap and easy by offering free and fast shipping. It wouldn’t be the holidays without a litt

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Rewound, the basic music player app released last week that you could skin to make your iPhone look remarkably like an iPod Classic, has been pulled from the App Store, according to Rewound blog post published on Medium.
The blog says that Apple pulled the app because it copied the iPod’s design, charged for Apple Music features, and people could mistake the app for an Apple product. The blog makes the case that the app had a pretty basic interface that loo

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service hasn’t exactly had a stellar launch, leaving those who purchased the $130 “Founder’s Edition” effectively paying for a beta without the features or graphical fidelity that Google promised it would deliver at its debut. That’s not to mention the day-one distribution hang-ups. But it is throwing in a freebie to help placate early adopters: a second Buddy Pass, which should be waiti

Photo by Alexander Gerst / ESA / NASA Earlier this month, we published a guide to figuring out what’s real on the internet — whether that means spotting a malicious “fake news” site or an innocent post with bad information. We also explained that individuals can only do so much. Schools, governments, web platform owners, and other institutions need to tackle bigger issues at a structural level. But that’s a much tougher task, and it might require a new way of think

Netflix is still looking for its big blockbuster franchise, but it seems unlikely that Michael Bay and Ryan Reynolds’ new spectacle, 6 Underground, is the answer.6 Underground is Peak Bay. The story is, frankly, difficult to parse, but focuses on six specially skilled people tasked with taking down a dictator in the Middle East. None of this matters. Instead, 6 Underground is defined by its 15-minute chase scene, an exuberant number of explosions, self-satirizing quips, and parkour. It&rsq

Wireless headphones are a game-changer, but they’re also often pricey. That’s why it’s a good idea to take advantage of any discounts when the opportunities arise — like right now.Status is offering exclusive deals on three models of wireless headphones to readers of The Verge. All three sets are easy to use, and you can pair them to your Bluetooth-compatible devices quickly and conveniently. Each of them allow for two concurrent connections, so you can switch smoothly be

Vjeran Pavic / The Verge It’s officially crunch time for buying gifts before the holidays arrive. If you haven’t yet begun your shopping, it’s time to start now, because if you wait much longer, it’s possible that your gifts won’t arrive on time — or you’ll pay much more for them to be delivered. On the other hand, you’ll probably appreciate that most retailers are offering the year’s best deals on the most popular tech products right now.
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For months, T-Mobile has been saying it’s got a smarter, sounder 5G strategy than both Verizon and AT&T. To understand what an optimal 5G network looks like, you should think of a fancy cake with three distinct layers, the company’s executives have claimed.
At the top is ultra-fast millimeter wave technology, on which Verizon is so far basing its entire 5G experience. Data speeds on millimeter wave are extremely fast (regularly over 1Gbps), but the signal doesn’t carry very

Image: Cadillac Cadillac Escalades are known for being big vehicles, and the 2021 version will apparently get a screen to match. General Motors’ luxury marque announced Monday that one of the key features of the 2021 Escalade will be a truly massive 38-inch curved OLED screen that stretches from the left side of the steering wheel to the midpoint of the SUV’s dashboard.While that’s not quite as big as the 48-inch screen that stretches across the entire dashboard of EV startup

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has stopped issuing licenses for new Android phone models sold in Turkey, meaning they will not be able to ship with its services, Reuters reports. The development comes just over a year after the country’s competition regulator fined Google 93 million lira ($17.4 million) over competition law violations. Although Google responded by making changes to its agreements with its business partners, the country’s regulator was reportedly unha

JetBlue is introducing AirSMR, a nine-minute audio experience that features calming sounds of airport announcements, the light chatter of crowds, snack bags crinkling, and airplanes landing and taking off in the distance. On paper, none of that sounds like it could possibly be anything other than an aural nightmare. But the experience is surprisingly soothing, particularly because it’s a made-up experience set in a fantasy version of JetBlue Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy International Airp

It’s difficult to explain what Wattam is and also make it sound interesting. The latest release from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, Wattam is a whimsical adventure about... well, it’s kind of hard to say. There are puzzles, and there’s a story, but mostly, Wattam is about playing around with 100 anthropomorphized creatures and objects, and seeing what happens when you mix them together. It’s about letting your inner child loose and experimenting. It’s play

Apple News has locked down a deal with ABC News to provide live video coverage of the upcoming 2020 presidential election and future primary and general debates, the company announced on Monday.The announcement comes only a few days after the Democratic National Committee said that it would be partnering with Apple News for its February 7th, 2020 debate in New Hampshire. Apple’s collaboration with ABC News is expected to roll out at the same time as the debate, so users will be able to acc

Photo by Frank Rumpenhorst/picture alliance via Getty Images The next decade is going to be defined by a revolution of battery-powered transportation, and the vehicle that will lead the charge won’t be the Tesla Model 3 or even the wildly polarizing Cybertruck. And it definitely won’t be an electric scooter.It will be an electric bike.For years, electric bikes were relegated to niche status in most countries. Between 2006 and 2012, e-bikes represented less than 1 percent of all annu

Photo by Avery White for The Verge Our review for the new HP Spectre x360 13 just went live. The Verge’s Dan Seifert says this 2-in-1 has a compact design with slimmer bezels surrounding its display, solid performance with its 10th Gen Intel Core i7 processor, and — drumroll please — a great trackpad.If you’re in the market for a new laptop and this sounds like a good fit for you, two configurations of the machine are already steeply discounted right now.Photo by Avery W

Tonight, SpaceX is set to launch one of its last missions of the year from Florida. For this flight, the company will be trying to recover as many pieces of its rocket as possible post-takeoff. The Falcon 9 rocket flying today will attempt one of SpaceX’s signature landings after launch, targeting a drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean. After that, two of the company’s modified boats will try to catch the rocket’s nose cone with giant nets.
If all goes well, it’ll ma

Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge Mercedes-Benz is pushing back the US release of its first mass-market electric vehicle, an SUV known as the EQC, to 2021. The $68,000 EV was originally supposed to start shipping in the US at the start of 2020.Announced in 2018, the EQC launched in Europe earlier this year. Mercedes-Benz says parent company Daimler made a “strategic decision to first support the growing customer demand for the EQC” on the continent. Mercedes-Benz also says that there

The Verge Like death and taxes, seeing a version of “YouTube is over” trend on Twitter just hours after a new policy change goes into effect is a certainty.YouTube’s updated harassment policy is no exception. Under the rules announced last week, YouTube will “no longer allow content that maliciously insults someone based on protected attributes such as their race, gender expression, or sexual orientation.” Essentially, people can criticize a creator’s work, b

Microsoft’s surprise unveiling of its next Xbox Series X console last week underscores the company’s big hardware ambitions for 2020 and beyond. The Xbox Series X will debut during holiday 2020 alongside Microsoft’s already-announced Surface Duo and Surface Neo dual-screen devices and potentially even more holiday hardware.
Bizarrely, we’re heading into the new year already knowing most of Microsoft’s big hardware releases, but there’s bound to be even more. T

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple Arcade is adding an annual subscription option for $49.99 per year, joining the existing $4.99 monthly subscription option for the gaming service, as spotted by iFun.de.
The annual option (which costs $59.99 per year in Canada, £49.99 per year in the UK, and €49.99 per year in Europe) effectively gives customers two free months of Apple Arcade by offering a full year of access to the service for the price of 10 months. Offering a disc

Adobe Adobe’s Photoshop for iPad is getting its first major update since launch today, with the addition of the Select Subject tool. The tool automatically selects clean outlines of the subject of an image, using Adobe Sensei’s AI to make selections while removing artifacts. Adobe trained its algorithmic models on a diverse set of images so the tool can recognize more objects and scenes, Photoshop product manager Pam Clark explains in the announcement blog.The tool first came to the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Starting today, Instagram will start warning users when they’re about to post a “potentially offensive” caption for a photo or video that’s being uploaded to their main feed, the company has announced. If an Instagram user posts something that the service’s AI-powered tools think could be hurtful, the app will generate a notification to say that the caption “looks similar to others that have been reported.” It wil

Image: Remedy Entertainment There’s a moment near the end of Control that is so unabashedly thrilling, joyous, and decadent in its design that it would make most roller coaster creators reflect on their life decisions. To say much more about the Ashtray Maze would be to spoil the giddy surprise. But it’s worth noting that, when it’s over, protagonist Jesse catches her breath and offers her analysis of the mind-blowing events that just transpired:
“…That was awesom

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google Maps has added a new feature that lets you search for electric car charging stations according to which plug types they work with. Now, when you search for a place to charge your car, you’ll see an option to specify the exact plugs you’re looking for in the filter bar directly below the search box. These include CHAdeMO, CCS, Type 2, or Tesla’s proprietary plug type. The new feature was first reported by Android Police.
The fu

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge With the recent launch of an Intel-powered 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 for businesses, we now have the rare opportunity to directly compare it to an almost identical laptop with a consumer-oriented AMD chipset. That’s exactly what AnandTech has done with a new analysis that pits two 15-inch Surface 3 laptops against one another — one featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 3780U and an enterprise-focused device with an Intel Core i7-1065G7.
What the results