Allison Johnson | The Verge

The square-ish phone that I wanted to love

2026-07-02T17:00:17-04:00

A great concept that falls flat.

The Ikko MindOne Pro is delightfully small.

I keep calling it a square phone, which isn’t quite right; the screen is square, but the phone itself is slightly rectangular. The camera flips up so you can use it for selfies — you can even open it partway to use as a stand or a kind of PopSocket. There’s a Clicks-style keyboard accessory that also adds a magnetic ring and a headphone jack. I tried so hard to like it, but this phone is a miss no matter how you look at it.

I used it like a normal phone. I downloaded a minimalist launcher and tried using it as kind of a dumb phone. I put the keyboard case on. I took the keyboard case off. Nothing feels quite right.

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I first met the MindOne Pro at CES back in January. It’s made by Ikko, a company based in Shenzhen that has mainly produced earbuds and audio accessories until now. The MindOne Pro is the company’s take on a small smartphone, or an AI gadget, or… both I guess. It ships globally and is priced at $499, though it’s currently marked down to $429 on the company’s website.

As charming as the hardware is, I noticed some yellow flags right off the bat when it got significantly warm as I was setting it up. Initial setup is always a lot for a phone’s processor to chew through, but the MindOne got noticeably hotter on that first day out of the box than most phones I use. A week later it has settled down a bit, though it doesn’t take much to warm it up again.

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Battery life is also pretty dismal. I watched it drop from the mid 90 percents to the 60s over the course of an hour and a half, and I wasn’t doing anything super taxing. Scrolling through reels, surfing around on Google Maps, and streaming some music — all over Wi-Fi — was enough to eat through a third of the phone’s battery in less than two hours. That doesn’t feel great.

The bad news just keeps coming. The novel camera design is a good idea, but the camera itself just stinks. Color processing is all over the place. It usually handles daylight okay, but photos taken under dim indoor lighting look too green.

The phone’s square screen is nice in theory — at least until you remember that the mobile web is built for vertical rectangles. The phone’s default behavior is to fill the entire screen area, which means cropping into the middle of vertical videos and websites. It’s not ideal and the onscreen keyboard fills up more than half the display area.

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Thankfully, Ikko includes some controls in the quick settings shade to help mitigate this. There’s a toggle for resolution, which fits more content onto the screen, and a toggle to change the display to a vertical aspect ratio with black bars on the sides of the screen. It’s helpful for the occasions when you run into text boxes and date pickers that just don’t work on the square screen, though it means you’re dealing with a smaller display area inside of an already small display.

Maybe that’s the point, though. I can appreciate the MindOne more if I look at it as a minimalist phone or an alternative phone to use on weekends. I like the idea of something like a Light phone that simply doesn’t run the mind-numbing apps like Instagram that I can’t seem to quit. But sometimes you need an Uber app, so I have trouble with all-in minimalist phones that feel too limited. The MindOne could be an alternative — sure, you can open the Instagram app, but it’s such a bad experience maybe you’ll do it less. Maybe I lack willpower, but I found myself scrolling Instagram just as often, except having a worse time. The best minimalist phone is a cellular smartwatch, etc. etc.

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I even have a hard time recommending the keyboard case. Again, it seems great in theory. There’s a little battery inside and you can flip a switch to have it charge the phone up while you use it. But somehow the keys are more fiddly than just typing with the onscreen keyboard. Maybe I’m just out of practice because I swear I was pretty fast on my Blackberry Curve, but I actually found it to be slower and fussier than virtual keys. The headphone jack is a thoughtful touch, though.

There’s a whole other launcher on the MindOne Pro dedicated to AI apps that I’m not sure I get the point of. It offers a chatbot that allows you to switch between LLMs, as well as a notes app. Ikko being a Chinese company, I wondered how it would handle questions that the Chinese government might not like. I asked it if Hong Kong is part of China; it responded in Spanish for some reason and said that it couldn’t help me with my question. It even comes with a global eSIM that you can toggle on — it’s free to use with the AI launcher, but you need to pay to use it for messaging and the like. The connection is slow, at least in my neck of the woods in Seattle.

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As charming as the concept is, I think a phone this shape was always going to have a tough time. Fighting to look at webpages and apps built for rectangles through a square-shaped window is just a losing battle. Maybe instead of a square-ish phone what the world really needs is a small, rectangular phone with modern bells and whistles. You hear that, phone makers? I am begging literally any company to make the iPhone Mini again with a USB-C charging port and a battery that doesn’t die halfway through the day. The MindOne isn’t that phone, at least for me. Maybe it is for someone who’s easy on the battery and isn’t picky about camera quality. The rest of us will just have to keep looking.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

T-Mobile is booting customers from its oldest plans

2026-06-29T17:06:14-04:00

Time to say goodbye to that legacy Sprint plan. | Image: Alex Castro / The Verge

Earlier today, T-Mobile started notifying customers that it will be retiring many legacy plans and moving subscribers onto one of its current rate plans. This move includes plans that date back to the 3G era, and it’s going about as well as you’d expect.

Affected customers began sharing screenshots of the text on reddit and Threads this morning, and T-Mobile’s chief marketing officer Allan Samson confirmed the news to The Verge:

We’re retiring our oldest plans, some of which were built nearly 15 years ago – in the 3G and 4G eras, and well before our 5G network was fully deployed. Customers will transition to modern plans that provide access to America’s best wireless technology, enhanced features and a 5-year price guarantee for peace of mind. Some customers will see no change to their monthly bill, while some will see a modest adjustment. Every customer moved to a new plan will keep their current benefits while gaining improvements in network and service experiences.

A post on T-Mobile’s website provides an FAQ with a little more detail. There’s no mention of which specific plans are being retired, but posts on Threads and people I’ve spoken to cite legacy Sprint plans, T-Mobile One plans, and Magenta Max plans, which T-Mobile introduced as recently as 2021. Predictably, not everyone is thrilled. The move has inspired plenty of dismayed and angry posts on reddit and social media, including a parody “statement.”

Throughout its rise in the mid 2010s under former CEO John Legere, T-Mobile styled itself as a challenger to the pricier, established carriers: AT&T and Verizon. The company adopted the name “Un-Carrier” and promoted offerings like Price Lock and the Un-Contract Promise as an alternative to Verizon and AT&T’s contracts and price increases. That’s likely why customers are feeling especially irked by the news that they’re being moved to new plans — not to mention that for some subscribers, those plans will cost more.

There’s not a lot of great news for those who are looking to leave T-Mobile for an alternative. Many MVNOs like Mint Mobile run on T-Mobile’s network — the costs can be much lower, but you’re not really getting away from the big carriers. And while there used to be four major wireless carriers in the US, that number shrank to three when T-Mobile bought Sprint in 2020.

RAMageddon just got extremely real

2026-06-25T16:59:55-04:00

Even Tim Cook couldn’t supply chain his way out of the RAM crisis. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

As far as prices go, Apple is kind of a reverse canary in the coal mine.

With its famously generous margins and immense purchasing volume, it can afford to ride out price fluctuations in its supply chain in a way no other consumer tech company can. So when Apple raises prices across nearly all of its product lines, you know that shit is well and truly real.

That’s what happened earlier today: Apple increased pricing across Macs, iPads, HomePods, and even the Vision Pro. Prices jumped hundreds of dollars in many cases. The MacBook Neo’s key feature — a $599 starting price — is now $699. The iPhone appears to be safe for now, but I’d be shocked if we don’t see higher starting prices on the iPhone 18 series when it debuts in a few months.

It’s all so alarming because Apple doesn’t typically mess with pricing on its current models. It certainly doesn’t participate in anything as common as a sale. If you walk into an Apple store to buy a new MacBook, you can count on it being the same price no matter what day or week or month it is. Sure, you’ll find discounts from third-party sellers on certain products, or maybe a gift card with your purchase if Apple is feeling really generous. Otherwise, an iPad generally costs the same price, year-round, right up until the day a new model is introduced. If the price is going to go up, it’ll go up on the new model; the current one holds steady.

But even for a company like Apple, the memory crisis is re-writing the rules of consumer tech pricing. First it came for the game consoles: the PlayStations, Xboxes, Switches, and Steam Decks. They all received price hikes, blamed squarely on the memory shortage. It came for laptops. Phones have suffered, too. The Pixel 10A is a barely warmed-over version of the 9A, and its best feature is that it didn’t get any more expensive than last year’s model. Samsung’s S26 phones were victims, with less storage and higher prices than the previous models. Every corner of the industry has been touched by the crisis, and Apple’s price hikes today underscore what a crappy year it’s been for consumer tech.

The funny thing is, more than a few tech companies picked this year to debut unique, premium devices. It’s the unfortunate reality of the yearslong R&D cycle. Apple is poised to launch its most expensive iPhone ever if it debuts a folding iPhone as rumored. Valve released its much-anticipated Steam Machine at twice the price of PS5. Samsung released the Galaxy Z Trifold for a small fortune. An ambitious game console from a company with a great track record of improving its existing hardware? That might just weather the storm. But a big, expensive phone with a questionable value proposition? Well, we already know how that went.

If nothing else, RAMageddon is going to quickly sort out the winners and losers. And if there was any doubt remaining, we know now that every consumer tech company is being forced to reckon with the memory shortage — even Apple. The company may have stumbled its way to the other side of its AI debacle and right into a crisis of another kind.

The Nex Playground is down to its pre-RAMageddon price during Prime Day

2026-06-24T07:47:21-04:00

You gotta admit, it looks like fun. | Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge

The Nex Playground is the family-centric, Kinect-like game console that made one Verge editor’s kids laugh, cry, and ask for more playtime, even when they were sick. The motion-based game play isn’t perfect, but it has won over plenty of parents — and it’s on sale for $239 at Amazon, down from its current MSRP of $299. That’s a healthy discount, though only slightly better than the Nex’s original $250 price.

Nex Playground

What if the dream of Microsoft’s Kinect lived on? It does in the Nex Playground, an all-in-one, motion-controlled console filled with kid-friendly games. Exhaust and entertain your little ones. You’re welcome.

Where to Buy:

Like so many other gadgets, the Nex Playground became a victim of RAMageddon when its price went up in April. It got a $60 discount shortly after for Amazon’s week of gaming deals — and again with this Prime Day deal — but it’s nothing like the $199 prices we saw before the RAM crisis hit. This is the new normal, I guess.

Still, any discount is welcome, especially when you’ll need a subscription if you want to play more than a few starter games. You can get a 3-month Play Pass for $49 to access a much deeper catalog of games, or pay $89 for a 12-month pass. The subscription economy and RAMageddon come for us all, but at least a sale can take a little bit of the sting out of it.

The Pixel 10A finally costs what it should

2026-06-23T13:08:05-04:00

No camera bump here. | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge

We can usually rely on Google to put together a compelling package in its Pixel A-series devices. The Pixel 10A was kind of a letdown, though. It added only a handful of updates, like satellite messaging and updated Gorilla Glass on the screen — but it still costs $499, like the Pixel 9A. Kind of a bummer.

Enter Prime Day: The 10A is down to $399 at Amazon, which feels much more fair. Getting essentially the 9A with the minor-est of iterative updates feels better when you’re paying $400 instead of $500. And staying consistent with the 9A, the 10A also offer seven years of OS updates. That’s a lot of years of not having to worry about buying another phone.

Google Pixel 10A

Google’s new Pixel 10A introduces faster wired charging, Satellite SOS, and new AI tools like Camera Coach and Auto Best Take. Otherwise, it’s basically the Pixel 9A, with the same Tensor G4 chip and a dual-camera system. Read our hands-on impressions.

Where to Buy:

In fairness, the Pixel 10A is probably a victim of RAMageddon, and I suppose we’re lucky that it didn’t get a price increase this year. And it hasn’t been totally clear what kind of deals we’d see on phones in the midst of the memory crisis, even those that are consistently marked down, like the Pixel A-series. The Pixel 9A was marked down to $400 for last summer’s Prime Day, so the smaller discount this year might be a sign of the times. Still, it’s hard to argue with the 10A at $400 — unless you find a great deal on the 9A, that is.

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AI search grounded in Facebook posts? What could go wrong?

2026-06-17T12:25:09-04:00

More AI search in more places.

AI is pretty reliable at putting things on your calendar these days, but it hasn’t quite cracked answering the related and all-important question of “What should I do this weekend?” Meta’s new AI Mode in search could be a useful tool — if it ever learns to stop getting stuff wrong.

AI Mode is a new option when you hit the search bar in the Facebook app. It’s designed to tackle complex queries — much like AI Mode in Google Search. But Meta’s version draws on public posts across Meta apps — including Facebook Groups and Instagram Reels — to inform its results. That could be useful, considering the neighborhood groups and local organizations around me that still use Facebook pretty actively to communicate about upcoming events.

But also, “search grounded in stuff people post on Facebook” sounds like a waking nightmare. Have you used Facebook lately? Your weird acquaintance from high school who thinks the Earth is flat has. Meta is pitching the feature as a tool to help you plan trips and find fun things to do, but given the data pool it’s drawing from, that could go south fast. Thankfully, I do have some comforting news: Its trip-planning abilities are mixed, but in my initial testing, I’ve had a hard time getting it to deliver true misinformation.

Have you used Facebook lately? Your weird acquaintance from high school who thinks the Earth is flat has

I couldn’t get it to spit out misinformation about vaccines causing autism, who did 9/11, or whether elections in the US are rigged. I did manage to get it to give me a dodgy answer about whether the January 6th rioters at the Capitol were “patriots.” It started with “Here is the essay you requested,” which is deeply funny. What followed was a pretty dubious theoretical justification of the actions of the rioters that day. You know, the kind of thing your weird uncle might post on Facebook. I couldn’t get it to pursue the idea any further; a follow-up question resulted in an “I can’t help you with that,” which was for the best.

On the more fun and practical side, I tried using the tool as intended, with the same prompt used in Meta’s press release: “Summer escapes near me.” It pulled in suggestions from some influencer-type Facebook posts, including an obviously AI-generated map of Puget Sound that put Snohomish in two distant locations. But the basic recommendations were solid, if obvious: Whidbey Island, Mount Rainier, hikes in the Cascades.

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Things got frustrating with more specific requests. I asked for things to do nearby, and it suggested a swim at the community pool — noting it would be closed over the weekend. It cited a post on the pool’s Facebook page, and the hours listed on the same page. But when I checked the source, nothing suggested that the pool would be closed over the weekend — and the cited post doesn’t seem to exist. The pool’s website also confirms that it’s open Saturday.

We’re about to go on a family trip to Minneapolis, and we’ll be staying downtown. I asked the AI for some kid-friendly activities and got an equally confusing mix of good recommendations and hallucinations. Meta suggested an indoor mini golf place I hadn’t spotted in my earlier research. Nice. But then it suggested a coffee shop with a turfed play area for kids — sounds great, except it’s in Austin. As in Texas.

I ran the query again later and got some of the same results, minus the Austin coffee shop, plus something else I hadn’t seen: a barbecue restaurant with a spectacular menu, cocktails by the pitcher, and a large, dedicated play area for kids. It isn’t quite in the neighborhood I’d specified, but it’s close enough and it checks all of the boxes. I guess the joke’s on me: AI might have just helped me plan my summer vacation. It just would have been more helpful if it hadn’t taken a detour to Texas first.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

My yard is dying, so I made an app for that

2026-06-12T18:14:50-04:00

When I returned to my computer five minutes after giving Gemini a lengthy prompt, I had two things: a functional app in a preview window, and a message about a bug.

“~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed!” Sounded bad! But right below it was a button to fix the bug. Pretty weird that I just instructed a computer to build a whole app for me with a single prompt, but it needed me to click a button to fix a bug. I did anyway, and in 233 seconds Gemini reported back that it had succeeded, using words like “blockages” and “race conditions.” I didn’t understand a bit of it. It was thrilling.

This was my second or third attempt at vibe-coding an app, depending on if you count one that I never took out of the preview stage. The project that never fully launched was a web app with one job: to check if a local high-end grocery chain is running its annual Peach-o-Rama event. So far, no peaches. However you count it, the project at hand is more ambitious: an app that will help me master my unruly yard.

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When my husband and I moved into our house eight years ago, we didn’t give a lot of thought to yard work. Sure, you mow the lawn and stuff, but don’t the shrubs and trees pretty much take care of themselves? We ignored the yard until the weeds moved in. The flower beds bordering the house and the boundaries of the yard quickly filled with weeds of biblical proportions. Clearly there was more to this whole “yard” business than we anticipated.

We won a couple of battles with the weeds but eventually lost the war and called in a landscaper. His one-time visit let us leave the yard mostly on autopilot for a few years. It worked, but then the weeds started creeping back and the shrubs were showing signs of distress. When the weather started turning spring-ish this year, I resolved to figure out what was going on with our yard.

I had a rough idea where to start, but I wanted some help along the way and a method of organizing the chores that needed to be done. Why not make an app for that?

I tried to be as descriptive as possible with my prompt, which was basically a list of demands: Help me manage a long list of yard care chores; Make recommendations; Take weather into consideration; Use image recognition to help diagnose problems with plants. I entered it all into Google’s AI Studio with the goal of creating an Android app that I could load on my phone and bring outside. You know, where the plants live. I figured it would take an hour or so and I could spend the rest of the day documenting the state of my yard and doing whatever the app told me to do.

My calculus was a little off. Sure, I had a working app in a preview window within a few minutes. It was logically organized, with sections to manage different plant zones and an AI “plant doctor” where I could upload images from my phone. But it had a major color scheme problem.

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For some reason, Gemini had decided on dark mode for my app, with dark purple and brick red accent colors. The text was illegible, but also, it was hideous. I suggested a white background with light green, pink, and blue colors, and reminded it to care about human readability. It returned with something more pleasing, and an enthusiastic greeting at the top of the app homescreen: “Welcome Back, Gardeneer!” Honestly, I like the adventurous edge of “gardeneer,” so I kept that bit.

I kept the basic structure that Gemini had come up with, too. I did have a few tweaks, like integrating live weather data rather than some weird climate presets that the AI had come up with. Apparently Gemini figured I could just pick the right “profile” to match the day’s weather conditions and it would adjust its watering recommendations accordingly. It seemed like an odd choice when live weather info is easy enough to call in via API, and it wasn’t the last time I’d have to remind Gemini of the difference between the physical world and a theoretical one. Otherwise, I beamed it up to my phone and started using it as quick as I could, too excited about shipping my first app to be bothered with iteration.

Except there were some critical things I’d missed when I’d glanced over the app on my laptop screen. I couldn’t edit chores once they’d been created, or schedule them for particular days. I could create profiles for individual plants and group them by zone, but couldn’t tie them to particular tasks or… do much of anything with them, really. There were separate tabs for one-off and recurring tasks, but every chore I added to the app seemed to disregard this sorting and landed on the recurring tab.

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This turned into a lot of tedious back-and-forth. I requested an update, waited for Gemini to implement it, deleted the old version of the app on my phone, and replaced it with the new one. I’d notice something else not working, like a date picker that doesn’t actually let you pick a date, and then have to go back to the chatbot. Rather than just an unruly yard, I now had an unruly app to tend, too. There’s a lesson somewhere in there, I’m sure.

On the other hand, the AI plant doctor was very effective right out of the box. It’s essentially just a “Hey Gemini, figure out what’s wrong with this plant” button, and I uploaded a picture of an ailing rhododendron. After a minute or so it spit out a detailed report card on the plant’s health (critically bad!), likely factors contributing to the problem, and some action items I could add to my planner with a tap. That was exactly the kind of yard help I needed.

Our landscaper’s set-it-and-forget-it fix had been to cover the flower beds with landscape fabric and river rock. This would take care of the weed problem for a long time, he claimed, and the existing plants would be fine. Plus, he offered a discount if we paid in cash. Done and done.

Now, years later, something was clearly off. The leaves on a bush near our front door turned yellow and flies were constantly buzzing around it. The rose bushes grew gangly and blooms were sparse.

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Gemini was quick to blame the landscaper-recommended fabric and rocks. It was suffocating the root system, it said, which was also drying out as the landscape fabric had likely become clogged with dirt over the years. On top of that, the sun-baked rocks were essentially cooking the roots from above on hot days. No wonder our yard looked like shit; it was actually a wonder that any of it was still alive at all.

At that point, it was too late in the day to begin Operation: Rhododendron Rescue. After all the back-and-forth making my app, I’d managed to squander a full afternoon of nice weather typing prompts into a chat window. Every time I hit enter and sent Gemini on a fresh coding mission, I’m sure I was chewing through the equivalent of a microwave dinner’s worth of electricity at a data center outside of Spokane or wherever. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

Even though my app still wasn’t perfect, I put aside my feature requests the next day and decided to just act on Dr. Gemini’s urgent recommendations for the rhododendron. I spent a sweaty afternoon with a podcast in my ears, raking back the river rock and cutting back the landscape fabric, as well as pruning some of the twiggier bits of the shrub. After that, I turned my attention to another one of the rock beds, this one covered in weeds that had started growing on top of the fabric. Hot tip: Don’t put a bunch of landscape fabric in your yard.

Here’s the secret of yard work that I didn’t know eight years ago: It’s extremely satisfying

It was exhausting work in the full sun, and once I got closer to the thorny Himalayan blackberry vines invading the yard, the expletives started flying. But here’s the secret of yard work that I didn’t know eight years ago: It’s extremely satisfying. That feeling when you get your tool under a big weed and pull the whole thing up, roots and all? Or when you get your shovel under the blackberry bush and rip it out of the ground, sending it back to hell? There’s nothing like it. Weeding sucks, but it’s also addictive. Once I get going I always have an easy time convincing myself to just stay out for another 20 minutes when I should really pack it up.

I did eventually call it a day, opened my app, and crossed off a couple of the yard chores I’d finished. Having spent several hours literally in the weeds of my yard, I had a new list of feature requests in my head. I wanted ongoing help from Gemini as I worked on reviving my plants, not just a one-time diagnosis. And as much as the idea of organizing my yard by zones appeals to my Type A nature, I’m not sure it does anything useful for me. I’m taking care of a small urban-suburban backyard, not, like, Central Park. Could this app have just been a Gemini chat and a list of to-dos in Google Keep? Probably.

I don’t think my “Gardeneering” app is ever going to make it to the Play Store, but making it has been pretty instructive. It’s hard to communicate how wild it is watching a computer turn your text prompt into a functional piece of software — kind of a “telling someone about your dream” situation. But you do need to go in with a crystal clear vision for the problem you want your app to solve. I could have saved myself a lot of back-and-forth if I’d done a little more work up front to focus on my needs before I started firing off prompts.

My adventure in vibe-coding has also illustrated something that I knew logically, but didn’t fully grasp: AI has no idea what the real world is. It didn’t hesitate to put black text on a dark purple background, because legibility isn’t a concern for a computer. It tried to interest me in generalized rather than real-time weather information, because what even is real-time weather to a computer? Even when I was working on my “Is It Peach-o-Rama Yet?” app, Gemini tried to pass off a version that would pretend to check the grocery store’s website and social channels, but would really just cross-reference the day’s date with the fact that Peach-o-Rama usually starts in mid-July. I had to insist that it mattered, actually, whether Peach-o-Rama was really happening.

I haven’t given up on the yard app just yet, but the right version is probably much simpler than the one I started with. And as for the advice I got from Gemini, it’s looking like the AI was spot-on. It’s only been a few days since I pulled the rocks and fabric back from the rhododendron, but I can already see some new leaves coming in on one of the branches. Maybe there’s some life left in my yard after all.

Apple’s new AI photo editing tools mostly work, for better and worse

2026-06-12T17:05:11-04:00

iPhone owners are getting real, native AI photo editing for the first time.

The most popular camera in the world just got its first set of serious AI photo editing features, and I don’t think any of us are ready.

As far as AI photo editing goes, the new features in iOS 27 are pretty tame compared to what you can do on, say, Google’s Pixel phones. But for the iPhone, they represent a tipping point in what the native photos app allows you to do to your photos. I mean memories. I mean, I don’t know anymore.

These new features are part of the iOS 27 developer beta right now, so bear in mind that Apple may continue making tweaks to them before they’re released to the general public. There are three, or maybe two and a half, new AI editing features in this update. The new Clean Up tool counts as half, because it existed before but was so bad it didn’t really count. That’s the tool that lets you take photobombers out of the background of your photos, and it got a major upgrade this year. There’s also Extend, which lets you expand the edges of your photo using AI to paint in some plausible-looking filler. And there’s Spatial Reframing, which mimics the effect of moving the camera around the scene to let you recompose an existing photo. It’s the most ambitious and maybe the most problematic of the three.

But first things first: Clean Up. It’s actually good now. Instead of only using on-device models to remove objects and fill in details, it can now use more powerful models in the cloud. This is what Google has been doing for years now, and it’s why the company’s Magic Editor tools were miles better than the version Apple introduced last year. That totally on-device Clean Up wasn’t very good at painting in convincing details to replace what it removed. It left weird artifacts and was generally more trouble than it was worth. Clean Up 2.0? It does the job.

Using AI to remove stuff from photos is the generative editing tool that I’m the least queasy about using. I’ll use it to remove a booger from my kid’s nose or take a stranger out of the background. This new version in iOS does all of that without a problem, and I think it’s going to be popular with iPhone owners.

Stepping up to the next level of complexity and what-is-a-photo-ness, there’s Extend. Think of it as cropping, but in reverse. It lets you expand the edges of your frame, which you might want to do if your composition was too tight on your subject and you want to give it a little more breathing room, for example. Extend lets you do this, but only to a point. It seems to avoid making edits to people, and will sometimes tell you a photo can only be extended in a particular direction. It will only add a little bit of padding, too, which minimizes the kind of shenanigans it can be used for. I appreciate that. Like Clean Up, it does its job convincingly. It seems predisposed to looking for symmetry, which usually works. It added part of a rally car that was out of frame in my original image, adding a side mirror to match the one already in the photo.

It doesn’t seem as eager to make stuff up to put into your photos as, say, Samsung’s early efforts. But I did catch it adding a potted plant on a side table; it looks reasonably convincing, but I know that it’s not a real plant. I’d feel weird about that if I were to put that photo on Instagram.

Extend works with your photo in a two-dimensional space; Spatial Reframing adds a third dimension. It builds on an existing feature that makes your photos look 3D-ish, allowing you to reframe a photo as if you had physically moved the camera and changed your perspective of the scene. You can’t go too far with it — only about as far as you could have moved your arm when originally taking the photo. But the idea is that you can fix your framing if you didn’t quite nail it when you took your shot.

Look, this appeals to my Type A nature. Sometimes I’ll love everything about a photo I took, except wouldn’t it be better if I had just stepped to the left to avoid framing something distracting in front of my subject? You can’t always catch that stuff in real time. These are the minor adjustments that Spatial Reframing is designed for.

Seems reasonable, except that there’s room to introduce existential chaos, even with minor adjustments. I tried changing the framing of a photo I took at a tech talk with Apple executives following the WWDC keynote. Since I was sitting off to the side, one of the execs onstage was mostly obscured in the original shot. I changed the framing and the AI kind of made up a guy sitting next to Craig Federighi.

Predicting what should come next in a two-dimensional space seems like an easier problem than in three dimensions. The results from Spatial Reframing compared to Extend reflect that. They’re weirder. The farther you are from a subject, the less latitude you have to “re-compose,” and the more realistic the AI-generated stuff is. But you end up with an image that’s only subtly different from the actual photo you took, and at that point, what are we doing?

In photos with a subject that’s closer to the camera, things get strange. The effect of “re-composing” is more dramatic, and the AI has to work harder to fill in the gaps. You can change the perspective in a selfie, but that means the AI has more detail it needs to fill in on your face, which gets a little uncanny valley pretty quick. Even within its limited adjustment range, it can make faces look a bit skewed and “off.” It’s more prone to inventing things that weren’t there. Sure, it sounds nice being able to rescue a photo from a composition that wasn’t quite right. In practice, I don’t think I like it.

It’s a small comfort that images edited with these AI tools get Synth ID labels signaling that they have been modified with AI. Instagram picked up on this info when I uploaded a couple of images, but only surfaces that information if you tap on the “AI Info” menu for that image. Labels aren’t exactly an airtight solution right now, and I think the bigger danger is the quickly eroding notion that we can usually trust a photo that someone takes and posts from their phone. Apple is certainly not the most audacious player here. But even introducing a little bit of doubt about the provenance of a houseplant on a side table, or whether someone was indeed standing exactly where they appear to have taken a photo from, can add up to a lot of trouble over time.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

I held the Trump phone

2026-06-12T12:45:44-04:00

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. We don’t have the phones we preordered yet, but this week included an unexpected in-person encounter with the T1.

You see a lot of interesting phones when you’re among tech journalists.

I’m thinking of two in particular that I held this past week: One was solid gold, with ornate engravings. It was elaborately embellished, heavy — an actual work of art. The other was the Trump phone.

I know. The Trump phone. The one announced almost a year ago that has shipped to almost nobody. But when you associate with tech enthusiasts from all over the country, you find some rare things. And suffice to say that someone managed to get this incredibly rare device. They weren’t supposed to be showing it around, but they let me hold it for a few minutes recently.

The Trump phone is fairly light, with all the earmarks of a midrange Android device. It has curved sides reminiscent of Motorola Edge phones from previous years and a plastic back panel. The American flag and Trump Mobile inscription are gigantic and impossible to miss. The gold color treatment reads as, I’m sorry to say, pee-ish in certain lighting. It comes with a small, printed user manual in the box, which is sort of adorable.

This week, iFixit confirmed what we all knew deep in our hearts: The Trump phone is just a midrange HTC phone with a gold color treatment. Aside from coming with Truth Social predownloaded (you can uninstall it), it looks and feels exactly how I would expect a phone of that ilk to look and feel.

As it happens, I met a tech YouTuber who goes by Technical Guruji in the same week, who also had a gold phone. But this wasn’t just a gold paint job. It was solid gold, custom engraved with an image of the Hindu god Ram and his devotee Hanuman. I can’t say I live a solid gold iPhone kind of lifestyle, but running my fingers over the elaborate engravings it was obvious how much painstaking work went into making it.

The gold iPhone that I held is one in a series of one. The Trump phone is one of… some? It seems that only a handful of reporters and influencers have gotten the phone, which was supposed to start shipping to customers last month. We haven’t gotten the phone that we preordered almost exactly a year ago. Neither have most other paying customers. The Trump phone is sort of close to being real, but for now, it’s only slightly easier to come by than an actual solid gold phone.

Got inside information on Trump Mobile or the Trump phone? Reach out securely from a personal device to tips@theverge.com, or see our How to Tip Us page.

I tried Siri AI, and so far it actually works

2026-06-10T13:51:34-04:00

Siri, are you there?

Parents want one thing, and one thing only, out of AI: to add a list of soccer games or “spirit week” theme days from an email or a poorly formatted flyer onto their calendar in one shot. And I have good news for parents with iPhones — the new Siri can finally do this.

After stumbling through its first launch of an AI-imbued Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly upgraded Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your yard, put together a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to lay down some compost in that flower bed. It can reference information in your email and calendar to make its recommendations or provide an actually helpful answer to the question: “When should I leave for the airport?” And yes, it can even add a list of events from an email to your calendar. I tried all of these scenarios out for myself and I saw it happen. AI Siri is for real this time.

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But it’s also a pretty basic set of features for an AI assistant in 2026, particularly if you compare it to what Gemini has been doing on Android for the past couple of years. Google’s chatbot has been able to add multiple calendar events from a screenshot for at least a year at this point. It’s been diagnosing plant problems and scheduling maintenance reminders for months now, if not longer. New Siri is built on Gemini models, so it makes a lot of sense that the first iteration of Siri AI feels a little bit “Gemini, circa 2025.”

Siri AI has its own flavor, though. Apple has a lot of proprietary stuff going on under the hood and in the cloud. It draws from an on-device pool of data that’s gleaned from things like email and messages. This information is indexed so Siri can tap into the relevant bits when needed. Prompts that can’t be handled fully on device are sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute with only the relevant pieces of personal data attached. Gemini handles personal context differently; you opt into sharing your Gmail or calendar, and then it’ll go directly to those sources to get the information when needed.

Siri AI working well depends a lot on the AI understanding context. So far, it’s doing pretty well. I asked it when I needed to return some camera gear I rented for WWDC, and it found the information from a calendar event I’d made and in an email (it’s due back Friday, for the record). Likewise, prompting it with something like “add these events to my calendar” will consistently trigger it to reference the information on my screen. So far, so good.

I couldn’t get Siri to engage in any shenanigans — I didn’t exactly stress test it, but the guardrails were strong enough to return a curt “I can’t help you with that” to a shady prompt. Fair. As a conversationalist, new Siri also seems a bit more dispassionate than Gemini. I gave them both the same prompt asking why the flowers in front of my house seemed to be wilting. They both gave wordy responses with a lot of possible causes, but Gemini’s started with “That is incredibly frustrating…” where Siri was more direct and got right into diagnosing the situation.

Siri AI’s response to my question gets to the point quicker." data-portal-copyright="" /> Gemini sends its sympathies. " data-portal-copyright="" />

The new Siri handled my follow-up requests well, too. I asked it to recommend a garden center “near home” and it came up with a good suggestion. It also created a new reminder list with some checklist items for my garden rehab project and added a calendar event, all from a single prompt. Pretty basic stuff, but this is Siri. The fact that it works at all is a step forward that’s been years in the making.

New Siri pops up in a lot of places on the iPhone. I’ve gotten into the habit of swiping down on the homescreen and using search to get to apps, and every time I do there’s a big prompt to “search or ask” with a glowing, blinking cursor. Long pressing the wake button summons Siri from the Dynamic Island now, too, rather than presenting it as a glowing border around the screen. The changes all add up to a subtle feeling that you’re never very far away from Siri.

The changes all add up to a subtle feeling that you’re never very far away from Siri

This iteration of Siri feels like the AI assistant you’d build if you knew you couldn’t screw it up. It supports a pretty basic set of features — it’s not out here DoorDashing your burritos for you — but it actually does what’s advertised. For the company that made big promises of Siri two years ago that never materialized, that’s a big deal. “It works” and “It will actually ship to customers” are the two targets that Apple couldn’t miss here. It’s only in a developer beta now, but it’s realer than the first AI Siri we were shown at WWDC ever was. Apple needs this version of Siri to earn back trust. And based on what I’ve seen so far, this looks like a small step toward getting that trust back.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge