Technology news

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple has informed its tech support retail employees that stock of replacement iPhones will be strained for the next few weeks, according to Apple Store employees who spoke with Bloomberg. This shortage marks one of the first instances of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak and its many ripple effects on industries worldwide, affecting the iPhone maker’s existing product supply. Bloomberg notes that the company’s iPhone 11 and iPad Pro lines

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Boosted, the company that basically created the market for electric skateboards, has laid off a “significant portion” of its roughly 130-person team amid a serious cash crunch. Boosted’s CEO Jeff Russakow and CTO John Ulmen said in a blog post on the company’s website that the “Boosted brand will continue to pursue strategic options under new ownership.”“We understand this news will come as a surprise to many

Photo: Logitech Logitech G is launching support for a new app that lets you customize your gaming audio for better immersion. The app is supposed to let you hear game sounds like large-scale battles, nearby footsteps, or racing sounds on a race track more clearly.The new app is called Immerse and was made by Embody, a spatial audio company, in partnership with Logitech G. Embody says on its website that Immerse was designed to let PC gamers “hear game audio as you hear sounds in the real

Twitter today revealed it’s testing its own version of ephemeral updates… a.k.a. Stories (because apparently the “rip off Snapchat” train is still chugging along). I can barely find the words to express how little I want this or how un-Twitter it seems. We’ve been listening to this feedback and working to create new capabilities that address some of the anxieties that hold people back from talking on Twitter. Today, in Brazil only, we’re starting a test (on

Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images US Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) is harshly criticizing what he sees as Amazon’s inconsistent response to ongoing coronavirus-related price gouging on the e-commerce company’s third-party Marketplace platform. While Markey is acknowledging that Amazon is indeed removing an ever-increasing number of listings, he said Wednesday in a new letter to CEO Jeff Bezos that Amazon’s response needs to improve. He’s chiefly concerned

A research team lead by nuclear physicists Mikhail Bashkanov and Daniel Watts from the University of York recently published research indicating that a newly discovered particle may be responsible for the existence of dark matter. Scientists estimate that some 80% of the universe is comprised of mysterious dark matter, but that’s about as far as they’ve gotten. Physicists aren’t sure what dark matter‘s made of, where it came from, or if it actually exists at all. But, as

Bendable displays may be all the rage these days, but there’s another material that could benefit from some added flexibility: concrete. Researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology have been developing a bendable, cement-free concrete that could hold up far better to earthquakes, and has a far lower carbon footprint than previous attempts at a bendable concrete. Developed by researchers Dr. Behzad Nematollahi and Professor Jay Sanjayan, the new concrete is produce

GM CEO Mary Barra shakes hands with President Trump in January, 2017. Automakers initially encouraged Trump to relax Obama-era fuel economy standards. | Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images General Motors just held an “EV Day” where it detailed a $20 billion push into electric vehicles. The company’s plan consists of releasing more than a dozen electric vehicles under each of its four main sub-brands, many of which will be built on an all-new modular battery

Image: iFixit iFixit has posted its teardown of Samsung’s new Galaxy S20 Ultra, and it reveals that the 108-megapixel camera sensor is, as you might expect, really big.You can get an idea of just how large the sensor is when you compare it to the iPhone 11 Pro’s 12-megapixel primary camera sensor, which iFixit did in the below photo:Image: iFixit
As iFixit rightly points out, though, a bigger sensor and more pixels doesn’t necessarily translate to better images. A 108-megapixe

BMW has a new logo, marking the biggest change to the company’s branding since the iconic emblem was introduced in 1917. As with many modern redesigns of logos made to chase today’s trendy aesthetic of a super flat ultra-minimalist style, the new BMW logo sacrifices the company’s well-known identity in favor of presumed modernity.There are two major changes to the updated logo. The first is largely positive: BMW is reverting back to a flatter design that ditches the very dated

People have been jailbreaking iOS devices for years in an effort to add a little more flexibility to Apple’s walled garden. This has mostly been a Mac or PC affair, with some jailbreaks showing up on iOS itself. But now you can now jailbreak a device with an Android phone too, as first spotted by redditor /u/stblr and reported by XDA. As noted by XDA, Checkra1n was the first jailbreak to work on iOS 13 devices, using an exploit targeting a flaw in the Boot ROM of Apple hardware rather tha

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Everyone wants to talk about the novel coronavirus outbreak right now, but you might hear YouTubers avoiding the subject — if they talk about it, they risk getting their ads shut off.
“For today’s video, I won’t be directly commenting on the recent health related news because A, I am not a health care professional, and B, I don’t need my video demonetized,” Linus Sebastian, host of Linus Tech Tips, says at the beginning

British Airways will debut its self-driving wheelchair trial at Heathrow International Airport in London over the next few months. It recently began testing the devices, made by Japanese startup WHLL, at JFK International Airport in New York. According to a press release from British Airways, the trials are part of the company’s involvement with the Valuable 500 Pledge, a business-to-business initiative urging corporate leaders to provide better services for disabled people. Ricardo Vidal

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Apple will now allow push notifications to be used for advertising, so long as users agree to receive the ads first.
As spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple updated its App Store guidelines today with a change to its traditionally strict restrictions around push notifications. Apple has long banned apps from using notifications for “advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes,” but that changes today. Apps can now send marketing notifications when &

Apple Maps relies upon third parties like Wikipedia and Yelp.Apple appears ready to add its own opinions about locations in its Maps app, much in the same way it curates the App Store with developer interviews, guides, and recommendations authored by Apple. At the moment, Apple relies heavily on third-party services like Yelp and Wikipedia to describe businesses and points of interest found in Apple Maps. Apple’s expanded editorial role is hinted at by a job description for an Apple Maps

Waymo unveiled its fifth-generation self-driving system Wednesday, which the Alphabet-owned company claims can see farther and more accurately than its previous four versions. The system features updated sensors that will improve Waymo’s ability to “see” the world around it. And it will be cheaper to produce, enabling the company to get more autonomous vehicles on the road faster and more efficiently.Waymo’s updated system will be rolled out as part of its forthcoming fle

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Valve’s new Index VR headset has been sold out for weeks, but the company just informed customers that the product will finally be on sale again on Monday, March 9th, starting at 1PM ET. Here’s the Index product page if you want to bookmark it for Monday — but you should be aware that stock may be limited.
“We do expect available stock to sell out Monday due to high demand, so all purchases fulfilled beyond this initial quantit

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AT&T is finally making its faster, mmWave 5G network — which it calls “5G Plus” — available to customers this Friday, alongside the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus and S20 Ultra. The launch marks the first time that customers will be able to access both the sub-6GHz and mmWave portions of AT&T’s network.The mmWave launch comes just a few months after AT&T opened up access to its sub-6GHz 850MHz network back

Photo: Google Google is expanding its internal game development efforts with a new studio located in the Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, Stadia Games and Entertainment chief Jade Raymond announced on Wednesday. The team, which will be dedicated to producing original titles for the cloud gaming service, will be led by longtime studio head Shannon Studstill who was formerly the head of the venerated Santa Monica Studio that developed the God of War franchise for Sony. (SIE Santa Monica S

Image: 2K Games 2K Games has added a 15-year-old Make-A-Wish recipient as a playable athlete in NBA 2K20, making him the first non-NBA athlete in the series’s history (via Engadget).
To add him to the game, 2K gave the kid, William Floyd, the same treatment as any other NBA athlete, including a full session in the company’s motion-capture studio, according to a press release:
Much like today’s biggest NBA stars, William’s NBA 2K experience began at the 2K Motion Capture

Like most health reporters, I know what I’m supposed to be doing during this coronavirus outbreak: washing my hands, not touching my face, cleaning high-use surfaces like my phone. But what I’m supposed to be doing and what I’m actually doing... well. Listen, I’m trying.
Not touching my face is the real challenge
Washing my hands: easy, love it, let’s do it more. Cleaning: don’t love it, but doable. Not touching my face, though, is the real challenge.
Here&rsq

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images After raging fires subside, their impact on peoples’ health will linger. During and immediately after wildfires, increased hospital visits document the direct toll of smoke and flames — from burns to trouble breathing. But the more insidious ways the fires affect people months or even years ahead has been more difficult to follow.Animals who’ve survived previous blazes can help us better understand those long-term effects, scientists say

Dispatches From Elsewhere doesn’t feel like a show so much as it does a wish. A man named Peter stumbles across an elaborate game, one that instructs him to go to unusual places and do outlandish things. Answer a pay phone and dance in public until Bigfoot appears. Attend a shareholder’s meeting for a company that doesn’t exist. Unveil a conspiracy or spearhead a revolution. Despite all the strangeness, the show is very clear about what it wants to do: help you to feel connecte

Batman’s Batmobile has always been cool, but Matt Reeves’ version in The Batman is one of the most badass.
Reeves shared the photo on Twitter today, showing the vehicle from three different angles. The menacing front — note the grille on top of the hood — adds to the impact. The side profile shows off the striking angular points to the vehicle, flowing down into the car’s rear — one that gives me Mad-Max vibes. Look, the car is beautiful. There are elements of

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Google has begun informing prospective job candidates that it will be moving all interviews globally to Google Hangouts or BlueJeans due to coronavirus, according to an email sent to one applicant from the Google staffing team.“In light of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and to protect our candidates’ and interviewers’ health and wellbeing, we will be conducting all Google interviews globally virtually via Google Hangout (or BlueJeans for appli

Photo by Andrew Liptak / The Verge General Motors just announced a huge new push into electric vehicles, including a new longer-wheelbase version of the Bolt EV that will be the first car outside of the Cadillac brand to get the company’s Super Cruise advanced driver assistance system. The new vehicle is expected to launch in mid-2021.
Super Cruise made its debut in 2017 on the CT6 sedan, and Cadillac billed it as “the industry’s first true hands-free driving technology.&rdquo

Fisker Inc., the electric vehicle startup founded by famous designer Henrik Fisker, announced more details about its upcoming SUV this week. The company released its first footage of the SUV on Monday and shared some new specifications after the 2020 Geneva Motor Show was canceled out of caution following the novel coronavirus outbreak.The Fisker Ocean, as the SUV is called, made its debut at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. It’s supposed to offer up 300 miles of range and is s

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today, Reddit is announcing new tools to help with suicide prevention, offered in partnership with the Crisis Text Line. The feature will let users report others who appear to be at risk so that Reddit can provide them with suicide prevention resources when they might need them most.Starting March 10th, if a Reddit user flags another user as potentially at risk, that user will get a private message with suicide prevention resources and a recommendation to

The media is full of advice about how to avoid spreading COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus. Most of it involves keeping your hands clean and not touching your face. But your hands aren’t the only things that touch your face. What about your phone?
In a recent article about how to mix up your own hand sanitizer, I mentioned that there wasn’t much concern out there about mobile phones. However, since then, I’ve been witness to several worried conversations about the possi

Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images During an ongoing crisis, the way that experts, officials, and leaders talk with the public matters. People rely on information from those groups to understand an unfolding event and to make decisions about what they should do in response. When that communication is done well, it helps manage people’s expectations and fears, and makes it more likely that they’ll follow future instructions from officials during the crisis. If it’

Photo by MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP via Getty Images No Time to Die, the 25th installment of the James Bond franchise, is pushing back its planned theatrical release date in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak. Originally scheduled to premiere in April, the film will now skip the spring and summer entirely and come to theaters on November 12th in the UK and on the 25th in the United States.
As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, MGM had already canceled publicity tours and other events for No Time

GM General Motors laid out its electric vehicle strategy on Wednesday, showcasing roughly a dozen products as part of a broader attempt to convey to investors how serious it is about embracing its electric future.In addition to showing off nearly a dozen vehicles, GM revealed an all-new electric vehicle platform with a new battery called Ultium. Much like Volkswagen’s so-called MEB platform, the GM system is intended to be modular with the goal of fitting into a variety of vehicle types a

The Strokes look like they’re 20 years old again in their latest music video. That’d be impressive makeup work on a group of roughly 40-year-olds, but the band doesn’t appear in the music video at all: every one of their faces is a deepfake.
The deepfakes were created by Paul Shales, whose meme pages have blown up over the past year. Under the moniker The Fakening, Shales has put Sen. Bernie Sanders into a dance troupe, turned President Donald Trump into a young girl, and added

Since it was founded in March 2006, there has been only one type of post possible on Twitter: a tweet. But starting today, the 280-character post is being joined by an ephemeral South American cousin: the fleet.That’s what Twitter is calling these new, more fleeting tweets — posts that appear in a separate timeline above the main timeline for 24 hours before disappearing. In other words, yes, Twitter is finally doing Snapchat Stories, and the implementation looks nearly identical to

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google is beginning to roll out its article-reading feature on Google Assistant that will read webpages aloud. This was previewed back at CES in January and is becoming available globally starting today.
To use the feature, users can simply say, “Hey Google, read it” or “Hey Google, read this page” for Assistant to read the text on your screen. The screen will also highlight the text that Assistant is currently reading so users

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook is opening up about the behind-the-scenes tools it uses to combat fake account creation on its platforms, and the company says it has a new artificial intelligence-powered method known as Deep Entity Classification (DEC) that’s proved especially effective.DEC is a machine learning model that doesn’t just take into account the activity of the suspect account, but it also evaluates all of the surrounding information, including the b

Facebook is providing the World Health Organization (WHO) with free ad space in response to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. In a post on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network is providing WHO with “as many free ads as they need” for outreach related to the outbreak. It’s also providing “ad credits” to other organizations and is working closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), UNICEF, and natio

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge SyFy won’t be renewing weird, wild fantasy show The Magicians for a sixth season. Yesterday, the network announced that the current season will be its last. The Magicians’ story will wrap up in the finale, slated for April 1st, and with it goes one of TV’s most underrated shows airing today.
At its outset, “what if Harry Potter, but with college orgies” was a fair shorthand explanation for exactly what the show was. Best

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is allowing and encouraging its employees to work from home as the novel coronavirus outbreak continues to spread in countries around the world. The software giant has updated its guidelines for employees, allowing anyone based in Seattle or San Francisco to work from home through March 9th. Microsoft is also recommending that those who are feeling sick, have a compromised immune system, or have had contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19 (

Razer Last summer, Razer’s Viper wired gaming mouse had the distinction of being the company’s most lightweight mouse yet. Now Razer has one-upped itself with an even lighter mouse called the Viper Mini, which weighs in at 61 grams (2.15 ounces). This may not be a lot different from the 69-gram (2.43-ounce) Viper, but it’s just a little closer to feeling completely weightless, if that’s your bag.The Viper Mini isn’t only a smaller, less weighty take on the $80 Vipe

One half of the New Glenn payload fairing. | Image: Blue Origin Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company Blue Origin has completed the first nose cone of its future orbital rocket, the New Glenn — and new video of the hardware shows the true enormity of this piece of equipment. With a diameter of 7 meters, or 22 feet, the cavernous nose cone is so giant that it can completely house Blue Origin’s smaller New Shepard rocket.
The nose cone, or payload fairing, is a crucial piece of any rock