Technology news

Image: Google For years, Google has included an extra search box within some search results, encouraging you to dig further and look only within a specific website. But now that sitelinks search box is going away because “usage has dropped.”
Google:
It’s been over ten years since we initially announced the sitelinks search box in Google Search, and over time, we’ve noticed that usage has dropped. With that, and to help simplify the search results, we’ll be removing

A still from Blade Runner 2049. | Warner Bros. Though it remains very unclear whether any of the self-driving vehicles demoed at Tesla’s We, Robot presentation will ever actually make it to market, one of the production companies behind Blade Runner 2049 thinks Elon Musk ripped off their copyright for the event, and are taking him to court.
Today, Alcon Entertainment — an LA-based production company behind Blade Runner 2049 — filed a lawsuit against Tesla, Elon Musk, and Warner

The Roomba Combo 2 Essential can clean and mop floors for up to two hours on a single charge. | Image: iRobot The new Roomba Combo 2 Essential and Roomba Vac 2 Essential include a dock for self-emptying their dirt bins — a feature missing from the budget-friendly Essential robovacs that iRobot introduced six months ago. The 2-in-1 Combo 2 features both vacuuming and mopping capabilities for $424.99 and is slightly more expensive than the Vac 2, which only sucks up dust and dirt for $399.99

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon says that it has gotten rid of plastic air pillows at its warehouses.
“As of October 2024, we’ve removed all plastic air pillows from our delivery packaging used at our global fulfillment centers,” the e-commerce giant said in an October 9th blog post.It’s a welcome change following years of pressure from environmental groups to stop plastic pollution flooding into oceans. The company is still working to reduce the use of sin

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The House Committee on Homeland Security is looking into Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) surveillance network in the wake of a report that nearly one-third of the agency’s cameras along the US-Mexico border don’t work. Privacy advocates say this is just the latest instance of expensive border surveillance infrastructure not working as advertised.An internal Border Patrol memo obtained by NBC News said that “severa

The 8 Elite comes with a new Oryon CPU. | Image: Qualcomm Just a few years after changing its mobile chipset naming conventions, Qualcomm has gone and done it again. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the company’s newest high-end smartphone SoC, and like the laptop chips it borrows its “Elite” name from, it comes with a new Oryon CPU. The company says that this shift enables faster performance and — lest we forget about AI — offers on-device support for multi-modal intellig

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Tesla has delayed the release of its range extender for the Cybertruck and downgraded the amount of mileage it will add for the dual-motor version of the truck, as noticed by Electrek. The reduced range and delay are just more ways that the Cybertruck, which saw some big changes from when it was first announced, has had trouble living up to its hype.Previously, Tesla said the range extender, which will take up a good chunk of the Cybertruck’s bed

Image: The Verge News Corp, the parent company of media outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is suing the AI search engine Perplexity for infringing copyrighted content. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, News Corp alleges Perplexity copies news articles, analyses, and opinions “on a massive scale.”
Perplexity is an AI startup that trains its AI search models using content from around the web, allowing it to respond to user queries with a summary of its sources. As

Image: TGL Tiger Woods is gearing up to debut TGL, a new “tech-infused, team golf league” he co-founded with fellow pro golfer Rory McIlroy next year. The first matchup at the SoFi Center in Florida will premiere on ESPN and ESPN Plus on January 7th, the league announced today.
TGL is essentially a big-budget version of Top Golf that happens in a stadium setting. In matches, two teams of golfers will drive balls into a 3,400-square-foot screen until they get within 50 yards of the &l

The Solix C300 DC, one of Anker’s latest power stations, provides a healthy balance of power and portability. | Anker Having an alternative power source ready for sudden outages or extended off-grid adventures is never a bad idea. Thankfully, the Anker Solix C300X DC Portable Power Station is a neat, affordable option that loads you up with enough power and USB ports to charge several devices concurrently. And right now, Wellbots is offering it to Verge readers for $148 (about $52 off) wit

Killscreen has taken inspiration from the Nintendo GameCube for its latest customized DualSense. | Image: Killscreen Following the 30th anniversary versions of the PlayStation 5 featuring an old-school gray colorway, Killscreen has announced a customized version of the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller called the CubeSense, which comes with a purple shell and custom joysticks inspired by the Nintendo GameCube.
Killscreen’s customized controllers are all based on a standard DualSen

Ford Ford is giving its flagship EV a makeover, a better price, and more efficient components, in a bid to maintain its spot as the second best selling electric vehicle in America. Say hello to the 2025 Mustang Mach-E.Unlike the 2024 model, this year’s Mach-E is not getting a range bump, but fortunately it doesn’t seem like it will be necessary. With an improved design, and some slick new tech, the refreshed Mach-E will likely stay popular among buyers for years to come.
First and fo

Image: Poncle The world of Dracula and the Belmont family is coming to Vampire Survivors. The newly announced downloadable content for the auto-shooter survival game, Ode to Castlevania, promises a bunch of new stuff: 20 characters, 40 weapons, an extra-large stage, and over 30 music tracks. Developer Poncle said in its announcement post on X that the $3.99 expansion should contain more than 10 hours worth of gameplay — though it’s not clear if there will actually be any vampires in

Image: AMD AMD is officially announcing its first next-generation X3D desktop processors today, based on its latest Zen 5 architecture. I’d love to tell you which Ryzen 9000-series X3D chips are arriving next month, but AMD is strangely only teasing a release date of November 7th and providing no pricing or further details.
AMD has only provided a single slide about this X3D announcement, ahead of Intel’s Core Ultra 200-series launch on October 24th. Rumors had suggested AMD would an

A motorcycle lights a street under pouring rain during a nationwide blackout caused by a grid failure in Havana, on October 19, 2024.| Photo: Getty Images Tropical Storm Oscar is making it harder to restore power in Cuba after a massive, prolonged power outage that preceded the storm.
The nation’s power grid failed on Friday after Cuba’s largest power plant went offline, leaving more than 10 million people without electricity. The grid reportedly collapsed four more times before Osca

Image: The Verge Disney will announce a replacement for CEO Bob Iger in “early 2026,” according to an update from the company on Monday.The entertainment giant has been on the hunt for a new leader since Iger’s return to Disney in 2022. Last year Iger extended his contract with Disney until December 31st, 2026, and, as The New York Times notes, delayed retirement four times during his previous run as the company’s CEO before eventually handing control over to Bob Chapek i

The Halo Select smart lock is Kwikset’s first to support Matter. It works over Thread and can also be used as a Wi-Fi lock. | Image: Kwikset The Halo Select is Kwikset’s first new smart lock in five years, and its new features, updated design, and creative approach to connectivity could make the long wait worthwhile.
The Halo Select is a ground-up redesign of the company’s Halo line and its first lock to support Matter. It works with the new standard over the low-power, mesh ne

Simply telling playtesters not to share any details hasn’t exactly worked out. | Image: The Verge Nintendo has updated the official website for its mysterious “Switch Online: Playtest Program” today, privately revealing more information to participants about what it entails. The playtest is running from October 23rd, 9PM ET until November 5th, 8PM ET, and is only available to the roughly 10,000 people who have already registered for the program.The test software is now availabl

The Special Edition model of the Galaxy Z Fold. | Image: Samsung Samsung just announced the Special Edition model of the Galaxy Z Fold. It’s thinner and a little lighter than the Galaxy Z Fold 6 that only recently went on sale, and includes slightly larger displays on the inside and out and a new banded pattern on the back. It also has more memory available for Galaxy AI and an upgraded 200 megapixel wide-angle camera.
Great! Unfortunately, it’s only been announced for South Korea, p

Michelle Yeoh is back in Trek. | Screenshot: YouTube Star Trek: Section 31 will premiere as a direct-to-streaming movie on January 24th on Paramount Plus, which revealed the date during a Trek panel at the New York Comic Con. Fans will finally see Michelle Yeoh’s Star Trek: Discovery character, Emperor Philippa Georgiou, put her Mirrorverse skills to use as a super secret space spy.
When we last saw Emperor Georgiou (an alternate dimension version of Captain Georgiou Discovery’s firs