Technology news

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge The Google mobile app is getting a dark mode, with Android and iOS users gaining the option to enable the feature by the end of the week.
After the update, the app will automatically use whatever theme your operating system is already set to if you use Android or iOS 13. Google says the feature is starting to roll out today, but it won’t be globally available until later this week. You’ll also be able to manually toggle between light and dark mo

Apple is joining other streamers in becoming a foster home for movies that studios are looking to unload in the middle of this global pandemic.Tom Hanks’ Greyhound will land on Apple TV Plus (there’s no release date yet), but the film was originally reserved for a theatrical release by Sony Pictures. The movie is described by Variety as being “set in the early days of World War II as an international convoy of 37 Allied ships, led by Hanks’ Capt. Ernest Krause, crosses th

Image: Tesla Panasonic is restarting production at Tesla’s Buffalo, New York solar panel factory this week after some businesses in the Western New York region have been given the green light to reopen, The Verge has learned. The factory has been idle for roughly two months.
“I decided to reopen the factory from Wednesday, 5/20,” Mark Shima, the president of Panasonic’s North American solar energy division, said in a Monday evening email to his 400 employees that was obt

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is rolling out the ability to use Google Fi via eSIM for existing customers of the cellular service on iOS, assuming their iPhone supports it (via 9to5Google). You’ll need the latest version of the Google Fi iOS app and an iPhone XR, XS, XS Max, 11 series, or 2020 SE, as those phones offer Dual SIM functionality. Google added eSIM support for new Google Fi customers last month.
Although the release notes for yesterday’s Google Fi iOS up

The head of NASA’s human exploration program, Doug Loverro, has resigned less than six months after assuming the position within the agency, according to a NASA memo. The drastic change in leadership comes just a week before NASA will launch its first astronauts from the US in nearly a decade, on top of SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon spacecraft.
This is the second time during the Trump administration that this role has been in turmoil. In July 2019, NASA demoted the original person in this

Image: Call of Duty League The Call of Duty League (CDL) announced today that you’ll soon be able to earn in-game rewards, or “drops,” for watching CDL broadcasts, and the Overwatch League appears to be teasing that drops are on the way as well. The announcement follows Activision Blizzard and YouTube’s multiyear deal announced in January that made the Google-owned video platform the exclusive streaming partner for Activision’s esports leagues.To earn the rewards,

Photo by Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images Joe Rogan, comedian and host of one of the most popular podcasts in the world, is taking his show to Spotify. The Joe Rogan Experience will soon become a Spotify exclusive, meaning episodes’ full audio and video will only be available through the platform starting later this year. Up until now, Rogan’s show has never been available on Spotify, let alone exclusive to any platform.The show will become available on Spotify globally starting on

Image: Disney Animated Disney movies are known for their incredible music, but not until the heroic Twitter-threaded efforts of Justin McElroy (a reporter for CBC Vancouver, not to be confused with Justin “Hoops” McElroy of the McElroy Family media empire) has there been a unified classification of every song. What follows is a compressive breakdown of all 18 categories, complete with taxonomy, defining characteristics, and even a periodic table of animated Disney songs.nobody:me: i

Sony Alpha just tweeted out a teaser for a camera announcement coming on May 26th. All Sony will say is that it’s a “new compact camera” along with a hazy outline of some sort of camera, likely with an articulating screen. Luckily, we don’t need to guess what it is because Sony Alpha Rumors recently dropped the details. It’s almost surely the Sony ZV-1, and if Sony Alpha Rumors’ leaked specs are correct, it looks like an ideal compact vlogging camera.
The publ

Photo by Win McNamee / Getty Images The Federal Communications Commission has received over 2,000 complaints related to the novel coronavirus pandemic, FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday.
Pai told the committee that the FCC has received around 2,200 complaints related to COVID-19 over the last few weeks. Of those 2,200 complaints filed, 1,400 have received a response from the carrier, Pai said. Around 500 of those total complaints wer

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook is launching what it’s calling a “universal product recognition model” that uses artificial intelligence to identify consumer goods, from furniture to fast fashion to fast cars.It’s the first step toward a future where the products in every image on its site can be identified and potentially shopped for. “We want to make anything and everything on the platform shoppable, whenever the experience feels right,” Ma

Photo by Buda Mendes / Getty Images Teardown and repair website iFixit has just posted what its CEO Kyle Wiens says is “the most comprehensive online resource for medical repair professionals.” The new database contains dedicated sections for clinical, laboratory, and medical support equipment, in addition to numerous other categories of devices. It also provides more than 13,000 manuals from hundreds of medical device manufacturers.Wiens says the effort began with a crowdsourcing c

Image: Facebook Facebook is making a major new push into e-commerce. The company today announced the launch of Shops, a way for businesses to set up free storefronts on Facebook and Instagram. The shops, which will be powered by third-party services, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and Woo, are designed to turn the social network into a top-tier shopping destination.In a live stream, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said expanded e-commerce would be important to begin rebuilding the economy while the pandem

Jet.com Walmart is shutting down Jet.com, the online shopping site it bought in 2016 for $3 billion as part of its attempts to better compete with rival Amazon online, an area that Amazon excels at compared to Walmart, via TechCrunch.According to Walmart’s Q1 earnings release, the decision to shut down Jet.com is due to the “continued strength of the Walmart.com brand,” with the company citing the Jet acquisition in 2016 as “critical to accelerating our omni strategy.&rd

The Jaguar I-Pace racing series, which launched in 2018, will come to an end this year after just two seasons due to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jaguar I-Pace eTrophy, as it’s officially called, will finish out whatever races it can this year alongside electric racing series Formula E and then fold up shop at the end of the season, despite being contracted to put on at least one more.Announced in 2017, Jaguar I-Pace eTrophy is run as a support class for all-electric raci

Image: Sony Sony is selling a limited edition PlayStation 4 Pro bundle in honor of The Last of Us Part II’s upcoming release. The $399.99 package includes a console engraved with a replica of Ellie’s tattoo design, matching controller, copy of the game, and a code for digital themes.
It’s also been stamped with the game’s name in every conceivable way:Image: SonyImage: SonyImage: Sony
I’m sorry, The Last of Us, you say? I couldn’t tell.
The themed PS4 and its

Like many YouTube creators, Faze Apex goes through periods where his productivity can waver. He might spend six months making videos regularly, and then he needs to take a break before picking it back up again. “When it comes to being active on my own channels, it’s been an up-and-down roller coaster,” he tells The Verge. “It takes a toll when you do it every day.”
But while people across many creative industries have struggled with staying motivated during the curr

The Galaxy S20 (pictured) originally launched without support for Verizon’s mmWave network. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Verizon is releasing a new version of the 5G Galaxy S20 on June 4th, which supports its fast, Ultra Wideband millimeter-wave 5G network. The “Samsung Galaxy S20 UW” will be available for preorder on May 21st starting at $41.66 a month for 24 months or $999.99 full retail. In addition to offering support for Verizon’s current mmWave network, it w

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Notion, the workspace and note-taking app, just became much more appealing to individual users. The company said today that people on its free plan will now be able to create unlimited notes, making it a top contender for anyone in the market for a sophisticated note-taking app or collaboration software.Previously, users of Notion’s free plan could create 1,000 of what the company calls “blocks”: individual elements you add to Notion

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The next version of Chrome for desktops is shaping up to be a much bigger update than usual. In addition to tab grouping and automatically blocking battery-killing ads, the browser is also getting a big set of improvements for security, safety, and privacy.When the update arrives in Google’s usual “coming weeks” timeline, users will see new features that fall into a few different buckets: user interface changes, more checks to prevent us

Max Bittker Many of our worlds have gotten smaller in 2020. Tiny spaces — a well-tended box garden, a stocked-up kitchen — have become more important and more satisfying. Orb Farm is an entire little world in a glass jar in your web browser, and it might be one of the most soothing things you try all day.
Orb Farm was inspired by Life in Jars?, a YouTube channel dedicated to self-sustaining jarred ecosystems. It’s a simple pixelated ecosphere that you fill with grass, fish, an

Photo by Jesse Grant / Getty Images for Disney Kevin Mayer, once heir apparent to the Disney throne, is leaving the House of Mouse to run a different kind of entertainment company: TikTok.TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, announced on Monday that Mayer will become chief executive officer of the incredibly popular video app and also take on the role of chief operating officer at ByteDance. Mayer might seem like an odd fit for TikTok — Disney’s social media ventures are limite

Over the weekend, Best Buy began offering a big discount on the Razer Huntsman full-sized wired mechanical gaming keyboard and the Razer Mamba Elite wired gaming mouse. Instead of paying $120 for the keyboard alone, you’ll get the mouse (usually $90 on its own) included for free with your purchase. When you add the keyboard to your cart, the mouse will follow automatically. This deal will last through this Saturday, May 23rd. Photo by James Bareham / The Verge
If you’ve been waiting

Microsoft is promising to dramatically improve its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration. The software giant is adding a full Linux kernel to Windows 10 with WSL version 2 later this month, and it’s now planning to support Linux GUI apps that will run alongside regular Windows apps.This will be enabled without Windows users having to use X11 forwarding, and it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environme

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon The amount of carbon dioxide humans are responsible for generating worldwide each day fell by 17 percent this April compared to the daily average for 2019. The steep drop is a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to estimates published today in the journal Nature Climate Change. That gets the world to about the same amount of planet-heating pollution it was pumping out in 2006, showing how much greenhouse gas emissions have grown in just the last 14 years.

The Opus are as comfortable as Sony’s WH-1000XM3. | Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Razer is usually known for its PC gaming accessories, but it’s sidestepping expectations with today’s announcement of the Opus wireless noise-canceling headphones. For $200, the Opus come awfully close to matching the features I’ve come to expect from headphones that cost nearly twice as much, like Sony’s WH-1000XM3s or the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700. In addition to

Photography by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Razer is usually known for its PC gaming accessories, but it’s sidestepping expectations with today’s announcement of the Opus wireless noise-canceling headphones. For $200, the Opus come awfully close to matching the features I’ve come to expect from headphones that cost nearly twice as much, like Sony’s WH-1000XM3s or the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700. In addition to having noise cancellation, these can automatically p

Microsoft is releasing a new Spotlight-like launcher app for Windows 10 today. Designed to replace and modernize the existing Win + R shortcut, the new PowerToys Run launcher includes quick search for apps and files across Windows, plugins like a calculator, and the ability to find running processes.
This early version will support basic search tasks that are typically handled by the built-in Windows Start menu search functionality. But there are plans to make this a more powerful launcher that&

Microsoft has been working to bring win32 desktop apps and its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps closer together in recent years. That work has an official name now: Project Reunion. It’s the latest twist in Microsoft’s promise of universal apps that run across multiple Windows 10 devices.“The idea behind Project Reunion is that it allows developers to build one Windows application and target all 1 billion Windows devices,” explains Rajesh Jha, executive vice presiden

Microsoft is creating a new lists app for businesses that use its Microsoft 365 services. Not to be confused with To Do, Microsoft’s consumer lists app, Microsoft Lists is designed to be the next evolution of SharePoint Lists. SharePoint users have been using lists for years to track issues and organize information, and Microsoft Lists will work across Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook.
Microsoft Lists will include templates for quick lists, configurable color formatting, and even t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is revealing some new features for its Edge browser today. The first is a new sidebar search option that’s designed to let you search the web without having to leave a tab. You can highlight text on a page and right-click to “search in sidebar” and see the results to the side of the page you’re currently viewing.
Pinterest is also partnering with Microsoft Edge to bring suggestions to the Collections feature inside the br

Facebook has launched its latest videoconferencing feature, Messenger Rooms, which allows up to 50 people to video chat at a time. There’s no limit to how long you can talk, and you don’t even need a Facebook account to join a room.Be aware that calls on Rooms, like Zoom calls, are not end-to-end encrypted. Also, when creating your call, unless you adjust your preferences, the room will be open to anyone you’re friends with on Facebook; not only can they join your room, they&rs

This might seem like the worst time to be building an event software business, but it seems to be working for Bevy.com, which just announced that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding.
Co-founder and CEO Derek Andersenexplained that the company had already started moving into virtual events when the conference business ground to a halt thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s seen demand explode in the last few months.
For example, he pointed to how Duolingo has used the

Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images A month into quarantine in New York City, software developer Evan Lewis found himself missing the subway. Maybe not so much the smells, but certainly the sounds. The screech of the brakes, the clack-clack of the train rolling over the tracks, the stern reminder to “stand clear of the closing doors please.”
“It was weird because pre-COVID-19 I would always listen to music on my commute to drown out the announcements and the music of the sub

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sony says 2.2 million people are subscribed to PlayStation Now, its cloud gaming subscription service that offers access to a growing selection of first and third-party titles.PlayStation Now has more than doubled its subscription count from around this time last year, when Sony reported that over 1 million people were subscribed. The increase in paid PlayStation Now subscribers also comes seven months after Sony announced it was slashing its pricing, wit

Samsung’s new T7 portable USB-C SSD in titan grey. It also comes in metallic red or indigo blue. | Samsung Samsung’s T7 portable SSD is now available following its introduction earlier this year at CES 2020. The T7 is the successor to the slim, wallet-sized T5 USB-C SSD that came out in 2017. If you’re feeling some sort of déjà vu and are wondering if this product might have already been released — well, yes, sort of. Back in January, Samsung released the T

Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge Microsoft’s new 13.5-inch Surface Book 3 looks exactly like the 2017 model — all the changes are on the inside. The big updates include 10th Gen Intel processors and new graphics options. Both are welcome updates, but they don’t fundamentally change the value proposition of the Surface Book.
That proposition is potentially a good one: for a higher-than-usual price for a pro-specced laptop, you get a device with a detachable screen you can carry

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Yesterday afternoon, Vroom, an online car buying service, filed to go public. Based on its SEC filing, Vroom is a highly-successful private company in fundraising terms that has attracted over $700 million during its life as a startup. T. Rowe Price, AutoNation, Durable Capital Partners, General Catalyst and other investors fueled the firm during its youth according to Crunchbas