Technology news

Game of Thrones fans excited for House of the Dragon — the upcoming prequel series HBO announced late last year — should prepare to settle in for a bit of a wait. According to HBO’s president of programming Casey Bloys, the series likely won’t air until “sometime in 2022,” via Deadline.Bloys wouldn’t offer any more details than that, save to say that writing for the series is underway, and that there were no casting details to announce yet. He also empha

Image: Akai Akai has announced a new entry to its iconic MPC (Music Production Center) line called the MPC One. The standalone music-making workstation has a more compact form factor and borrows essentials from other Akai products to offer an MPC at a more affordable price point.
There are a lot of similarities between the MPC One and its recent(ish) predecessors, the MPC Live and MPC X. They all have the signature square of 16 velocity and pressure-sensitive pads, a multitouch display, network

For the last few months, Ryan Jones’ Guess My Word has offered a simple, albeit not always painless, way to breeze through downtime at work. It works in your browser, and it’s pretty simple: guess a word, and the software will tell you if the correct answer falls before or after it. Sounds easy, right?Haha! Just kidding! It’s actually surprisingly hard and will make you realize how rusty you are at reciting the alphabet in your head. The game offers a “normal” and &

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Over the past few years, there has been a considerable uptick in union organizing from workers at tech companies. If you or your fellow workers have considered organizing and want to do so as securely as possible, Vice has put together a helpful guide that you should read. (Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, East union through my employment at The Verge.)Vice’s guide covers how to assess your company’s policies to

Photo by Gary Hershorn/Corbis via Getty Images Bose plans to close its entire retail store footprint in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. The company announced the decision earlier today and pointed to the fact that its headphones, speakers, and other products “are increasingly purchased through e-commerce” as the reasoning. Hundreds of employees will be laid off as a result.Bose opened its first physical retail store in 1993 and currently has locations in many shopping c

Photo by WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images Athletes at the Australian Open are breathing in poor-quality air polluted by bushfire smoke, making it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs. Dalila Jakupovic, ranked 210 in the world by the Women’s Tennis Association, withdrew from her qualifying match yesterday after smoke sent her into a coughing fit. Maria Sharapova’s match was abandoned after two hours of play in smoky air, and Novak Djokovic said before the start of the tournam

Image: Wyze Earlier today, Apple confirmed it purchased Seattle-based AI company Xnor.ai (via MacRumors). Acquisitions at Apple’s scale happen frequently, though rarely do they impact everyday people on the day of their announcement. This one is different.Cameras from fellow Seattle-based company Wyze, including the Wyze Cam V2 and Wyze Cam Pan, have utilized Xnor.ai’s on-device people detection since last summer. But now that Apple owns the company, it’s no longer available.

Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images The term “OK Boomer” has been entered into the official records of the US Supreme Court. Today, Chief Justice John Roberts used the phrase as a means to discuss age discrimination at a Supreme Court hearing and whether uttering it during a job interview could qualify as legal evidence.
The moment came during a case hearing for Babb v. Wilkie, in which plaintiff Norris Babb — who was in her early 50s at the time of the incident —

Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has officially crossed $1 billion at the box office worldwide, making it Disney’s seventh film in 2019 to hit the 10-figure mark, via Variety. But The Rise of Skywalker has taken longer than its predecessors to hit $1 billion, the latest indication that the ninth Star Wars film just isn’t doing very well at the box office compared to the other sequels.
For nearly any other film, hitting $1 billion at the box office in four weeks would

Instagram announced in December that it was rolling out a false information warning feature that used third-party fact-checkers to reduce the spread of misinformation. But the feature is now labeling some digitally manipulated art as false information and hiding photos from digital artists and photographers from the Explore and hashtag pages.According to PetaPixel, photographer Toby Harriman spotted the false information warning pop-up on a photo of a man standing in front of some rainbow-colore

Finally, Jigglypuff gets to sing under the lights... of the testing lab. | Image: FCC Filings for a Bluetooth speaker that looks like Jigglypuff made by GameStop’s ThinkGeek brand have been published by the Federal Communications Commission. That means that if you’ve ever wanted a real-life Jigglypuff to sing you to sleep, you might be able to make that dream a reality sometime soon.Here’s what the speaker looks like, from the filings:It’s cute! I was especially charmed

Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post via Getty Images Last summer, a video of Mark Zuckerberg circulated on Instagram in which the Facebook CEO appeared to claim he had “total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures.” It turned out to be an art project rather than a deliberate attempt at misinformation, but Facebook allowed it to stay on the platform. According to the company, it didn’t violate any of its policies.
For some

Microsoft is launching its new Chromium-based Edge browser today. It comes with built-in tracking protection, a new Collections feature to grab images and content from the web, and an Internet Explorer mode for businesses. If you’re currently a Chrome user, then it’s very familiar in terms of overall features and the user interface.
Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and macOS users will all be able to download and install the new version of Edge today. Microsoft will be rolling thi

Microsoft is officially launching its new Edge Chromium browser today across both Windows and macOS. A stable version of the browser is now available for everyone to download, just over a year after the software maker revealed its plans to switch to Chromium. Microsoft is initially targeting Edge at enterprise users of Windows and macOS, but consumers will be able to manually download and install it, too.
In the coming months, Microsoft plans to automatically update Windows 10 users with this ne

Photo credit should read CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images 2019 was the second-hottest year ever recorded, NASA, NOAA, and the World Meteorological Organization confirmed today. It’s a fittingly disastrous close to the hottest decade on record. The news follows a similar announcement last week from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an initiative of the European Union.The only year that beat out 2019 was 2016. That year saw global average surface temperatures that were just 0.04

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg Today is the first time we’re seeing a price drop on the new Surface Pro X tablet, Microsoft’s reimagining of the stayed Surface Pro design that features a custom Qualcomm processor and supports 4G LTE out of the box. At Best Buy, you can get the base model (featuring 8GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD storage) for $899.99, which is $100 off of its usual price.
In order to get this deal, you’ll need to be a My Best Buy member, though it’s free t

Image: Bang & Olufsen Bang & Olufsen has updated its true wireless earbuds, giving them a big boost in battery life as well as a more compact design. The new third-generation Beoplay E8 earbuds now provide a total of 35 hours of listening when used with their charging case, up from the 16 hours you’d get with the second generation, while the buds themselves can now go for seven hours without needing to charge.
This is Bang & Olufsen’s third attempt at a pair of true wire

Less than a week after news that Pokémon Sword and Shield will get new content through expansions, The Pokémon Company announced that it’s airing a new series on YouTube called Pokémon: Twilight Wings. The seven-episode animated show is based in Sword and Shield’s Galar region and features familiar faces like champion Leon and Chairman Rose.Each episode will be about five minutes long, with new episodes airing once a month until summer. The first episode, “

Fortnite is adding a Ninja skin to the game that’ll be available starting tomorrow, January 16th. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins announced the availability on a stream this morning, shouting in excitement.
“It happened it’s official, we finally got a Ninja skin. In the game. In Fortnite. We did it,” he said.
The skin “looks just like me,” Blevins shouted while showing off the character in the game. It has spiked blue hair, a blue jacket with a hood, and bla

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Code added in the latest version of the Google Phone app suggests that it could support native call recording in the future. XDA-Developers was first to spot the code, which appeared in the app downloaded to a Pixel 4. The dialer app adds a new layout, icon, and other assets consistent with a call recording feature. The Google Phone app is currently the default dialer application on devices including Pixel and Android One phones.
Call recording has ha

At this point, there are vanishingly few reasons to hang on to a Wii U. Since the debut of the Switch in 2017, Nintendo has steadily been porting the Wii U’s best games to its hybrid device, titles that originally didn’t reach a massive audience because the console was largely a flop. That includes everything from Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze to Mario Kart 8 to New Super Mario Bros. U. So far the strategy has worked. In fact, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the Switch’s bestsell

Image: Spotify Spotify is launching a silly new playlist generator today that promises to create a playlist that both you and your pet will enjoy. The whole thing seems to be designed to go viral, which is one of the ways Spotify has had luck standing out from competitors like Apple Music that have largely the same exact music offering.
To get a playlist for your pet, you have to head over to Spotify’s Pet Playlist website. It then presents you with five pet options — cat, dog, igua

Twitter users have been asking for the option to edit tweets ever since the service launched in 2006, but the company has always prevaricated, saying it’s looking into the problem, or considering it deeply, or a hundred other ways of saying “please stop bothering us about this, please.”Now, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has given perhaps the most definitive answer on the question to date. During a video Q&A with Wired, Dorsey was asked if there’ll be an edit button for Twit

Yesterday’s computer news was about something old: Windows 7. After 11 years, Microsoft is officially ending support for it — though as Tom Warren notes, there’s a healthy chance the company will blink and provide some kind of security update at some point for something critical.
Windows has a reputation for shipping a good version, then a bad version. Windows 7 was one of the good versions, and upgrades to Windows 10 are free for consumers. That means you can skip right over W

This morning, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch are recreating their history-making all-female spacewalk. The pair will head outside the International Space Station today to do some more upgrades. It’ll be just the second time in history that two women have suited up — without any men — and performed a spacewalk together. And if all goes to plan, the pair could do it all again next week.
The purpose of today’s spacewalk isn’t all that remarkable, other

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge It’s a relatively slow week on the platforms-and-democracy beat, so let’s talk about something small but fascinating in its own way: the arrival of Instagram messages on the web.An unfortunate thing about being a xennial who grew up using (and loving) the world wide web is that most developers no longer build for it. Over the past 15 years, mobile phones became more popular than desktop computers ever were, and the result is that web developme

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The latest update to Google’s Smart Lock app on iOS means you can now use your iPhone as a physical 2FA security key for logging into Google’s first-party services in Chrome. Once it’s set up, attempting to log in to a Google service on, say, a laptop, will generate a push notification on your nearby iPhone. You’ll then need to unlock your Bluetooth-enabled iPhone and tap a button in Google’s app to authenticate before the lo

Logitech has been making its way into the ergonomic mouse space for a while now, with hardware like the MX Ergo and MX Vertical mice. Now it’s looking to expand its ergonomic accessories into the keyboard space with the launch of the split Ergo K860 keyboard.Logitech says that the Ergo K860’s design “reduces muscle strain on your wrists and forearms” compared to traditional keyboards due to the wrist rest and split-key, curved design.Much like how Logitech’s Craft a

In November 2018, DJI claimed that a “parts shortage” had left the Chinese drone company without the ability to produce its Phantom 4 Pro. By April, the company’s entire iconic Phantom lineup had mysteriously vanished from shelves. But 14 months after the company’s flagship drone went AWOL, it’s back on sale this month.
DJI told DPReview that the parts shortage is now over and the Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 is now back on sale as of January 6th — and sure enough, we&r

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is introducing filters to the Subscriptions tab on its iOS app today, to make it less intimidating to figure out what to watch next (via 9to5Google). The company says it plans to bring them to Android phones “in the future.” The filters exist to help users more easily order their unwatched videos from channels they subscribe to — and could be particularly helpful for people who subscribe to a lot of channels.With the filters, user