Technology news

Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge Less than a week ahead of its much-anticipated iPad hardware event, Apple shared its Q2 2024 earnings today, and the numbers paint a predictable picture for the increasingly dated tablet line. iPad revenue fell substantially yet again (by 17 percent year over year) amid the longest-ever wait for new models — something Apple is days away from finally rectifying. At the same time, iPhone sales tapered off a bit (down 10 percent), while the company’s servi

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The Federal Communications Commission is asking for more funding to help internet service providers rip and replace equipment made by Huawei and ZTE. In a letter to Congress, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel says the government has only allocated $1.9 billion to reimburse providers, which is $3.08 billion less than the $4.98 billion the FCC estimates it will need.
After designating the China-owned Huawei and ZTE as national securi

Seagate’s speedy storage expansion cards are a necessary evil and expensive without these periodic sales. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge If your main gaming platform is the Xbox Series X or S and you have a particularly deep library, bring it in for a hug. The markups on its proprietary storage cards are exorbitant, but regular discounts are starting to make them a little more affordable. For example, Seagate’s 2TB Storage Expansion Card is on sale for $226.76 (down from $359.99)

Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images My breaking point with promotional emails and desktop alerts finally happened a few weeks ago. I woke up at 7AM to an automated Legacy.com email with my friend’s death-a-versary in the subject line. The email itself was annoying enough, but what it said made it a cold, thoughtless annoyance: “Being remembered matters. The flowers you sent last year were a comforting gesture of sympathy and support.”I didn’t send flowers.

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated labor laws when making “coercive statements” about unions during interviews conducted in 2022, a judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Wednesday.The ruling, which stems from a complaint filed in October 2022, cites three instances in which Jassy commented negatively about unions. During an interview with CNBC in April 2022, Jassy said employees are “better off” not forming a union. Ja

The Ecobee Smart Thermostat will lose its smarts on July 31st. | Image: Ecobee Ecobee is discontinuing support for the very first smart thermostat. As of July 31st, 2024, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat and the Ecobee Energy Management System (EMS) thermostats will no longer be able to be controlled remotely or use any smart integrations. Basically, anything that requires an internet connection will stop working. They will still continue to control your HVAC in the same way a non-smart device does &

Today’s NHS faces severe time constraints, with the risk of short consultations and concerns about the risk of misdiagnosis or delayed care. These challenges are compounded by limited resources and overstretched staff that results in protracted patient wait times and generic treatment strategies. Staff can operate with a surface level view of patient data, relying on basic medical histories and recent test results. This lack of comprehensive data interferes with their ability to fully und

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Apple Watch’s atrial fibrillation (AFib) history feature, which records and alerts the wearer’s relevant heart events, has been qualified to join the FDA’s Medical Device Development Tools (MDDT) program — a first for a “digital health technology.” That means the Apple Watch is now usable in clinical studies that need estimated data on how much time the wearer spent in atrial fibrillation while wearing the device, 9to5Mac

The iPad is kind of a computer... but kind of not. | Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge When Apple CEO Tim Cook and a bunch of his deputies take the virtual stage next week to announce new iPads, they’re going to spend a lot of time talking about specs. If the rumors are true, we’re going to get new iPad Pros with OLED screens and thinner bodies, new Airs with faster chips and a correctly placed front camera, and a couple of new accessories. Before they even launch, I feel confident tell

Satya Nadella, the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corporation speaks during the “Microsoft Build: AI Day” event. | Photo by Peerapon Boonyakiat / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images Microsoft just agreed to support the development of 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity around the world, a massive amount of electricity to fuel its AI ambitions and climate goals.
For comparison, 10.5 GW of renewable energy amounts to nearly half the amount of solar and wind

Image: University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory (TAO) officially opened on Tuesday after 26 years of planning and construction. Sitting 18,500 feet high on Mount Chajnantor in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the 6.5-meter optical-infrared TAO telescope is now the highest in the world.TAO replaces a smaller version of itself called MiniTAO, which held the highest telescope distinction before it. It beats the Chacaltaya Observatory, owned by the University of Madrid and sitting

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The FBI cut its warrantless searches of American data in half in 2023, according to a government report released on Tuesday. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s annual transparency report, the FBI conducted 57,094 searches of “US person” data under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year — a 52 percent decrease from 2022.
In a press briefing, a senior FBI officia

Image: The Verge Apple is exempting more developers from the Core Technology Fee (CTF) it introduced in the European Union. In an update on Thursday, Apple announced that developers of free apps without monetization won’t have to pay the new fee.
To qualify, Apple says free apps must not have “revenue of any kind,” including money made from physical or digital goods, as well as advertising. “This condition is intended to give students, hobbyists, and other non-commercial

Illustration: The Verge An article in by HouseFresh, a site dedicated to air quality, hit a nerve in February: it outlined how independent publishers have been gradually bumped out of Google search results, with big media companies taking their place. Months later, the situation has only gotten more dire, according to a follow-up published by HouseFresh.
In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publi

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Spotify could soon bring shortform video clips to more areas of the app. A test spotted by Music Ally shows clips surfacing on playlist pages, allowing you to swipe through a vertical feed with videos less than 30 seconds long.
Spotify first introduced clips last year as a way for artists to communicate with fans and promote their music, but the platform only showed clips on artist profiles, album pages, and album countdown pages. However, that seems to b

Image: Universal Studios / Nintendo The Super Nintendo World area opening at Universal Studios in Orlando next year will include every attraction from the existing theme parks in Hollywood and Japan — including the first Donkey Kong Country realm in the US. That’s according to Universal’s latest teaser for its fourth Orlando-based park, Epic Universe, which provides some clarity over what guests can expect on opening day in 2025.
Some of the experiences coming to Orlando’

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft is fully rolling out passkey support for all consumer accounts today. After enabling them in Windows 11 last year, Microsoft account owners can also now generate passkeys across Windows, Android, and iOS. This makes it effortless to sign in to a Microsoft account without having to type a password in every time.
You can create passkeys for your Microsoft account by following this link, and you can choose your face, fingerprint, PIN, or a security key to use a dev

When the EU approved the European Green Deal in 2020, the bloc unveiled a plan to lead the clean energy transition. Yet it has since faced growing competition from both China — which has quickly and quietly buried Europe’s solar panel industry and is now taking aim at its EV market — and the US, which under the Biden administration took an about-face on sustainability with the introduction of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. As the EU invests more into renewables, it will

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Nvidia is releasing a script that simplifies getting its GeForce Now cloud gaming service up and running on Valve’s Steam Deck device. The script automatically installs Google Chrome, adjusts the browser to enable gamepad use, and then adds a GeForce Now shortcut to your Steam library.
While the script automates the process of using the SteamOS terminal app to install Chrome and enable gamepad support, you’ll still need to make some manual tweaks to

Image: Bose Say what you will about Bose’s more ambitious swings — I appreciate that it takes them in the first place — but today, the company is releasing a new product in a category that it’s always been pretty excellent at: Bluetooth speakers. Bose is more or less supersizing its SoundLink Flex into a new, larger model called the SoundLink Max. Considering how Bose’s acoustic processing has for years squeezed impressive sound out of relatively small hardware, I&r

Image: Microsoft Microsoft says it’s investigating reports of VPN connection failures after installing the April 2024 Windows 11 update. The KB5036893 security update was issued on April 9th for all supported Windows 11 versions, and some users have reported that VPN connections with TPM-backed certificates aren’t working after the patch was installed.
Reddit user Flo-TPG says the Windows 11 update caused “a certificate could not be found” error while attempting to use a

Google may start asking users that still utilize passwords instead of their passkeys to wait 24 hours before they can access their account. | Illustration: The Verge Google is kicking off World Password Day by updating us on its efforts to replace the often hacked, guessed, and stolen form of authentication with passkeys. Their passwordless approach relies on device-based authentication instead, making logging in faster and more secure.In a blog post on Thursday, the company announced that over