It’s all about the court of public opinion.
Microsoft’s new Xbox leader starts to talk strategy for the company’s gaming business.
Xbox is Microsoft’s gaming identity moving forward.
Asha Sharma has a new strategy for her return of Xbox.
Leadership reshuffling signals the mounting pressure on Microsoft’s AI bet.
Dreame plans to build everything from hypercars and hair dryers to China’s Elon Musk. It’ll either win big or go down in flames.
How two Chinese tool brands are becoming household names.
From window shopping and browsing to reviews and recommendations, retailers and tech companies envision a future filled with artificial intelligence — whether shoppers want it or not.
On The Vergecast: how online shopping became boring in an era of unmitigated mass consumption. Plus, what a small nonprofit is doing to save and recycle textile waste.
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Verge Score
The Find X9 Ultra has the best 10x telephoto lens yet, but would be a better phone without it.
I thought the Vivo X300 Ultra’s extender lenses were a gimmick. Now I’m hooked.
The Xiaomi 17 Ultra and its Leica co-branded special edition are closer to cameras than ever before.
Cook’s relentless optimization propelled Apple’s fortunes to new heights and an era of predictable profitability.
Does Tim Cook’s newly announced successor have what it takes to regain the company’s lost ground in the AI race?
John Ternus inherits a smart home platform that’s been waiting a decade to matter. His first act could be making it happen.
Cook and incoming CEO John Ternus made a computer company the most important audio company of the 21st century.
Insta360 cameras and Antigravity drones can use Gaussian splats to digitize little chunks of the world.
Organizing playlists into folders was introduced in 2010, but only available on the desktop app. Now it’s reportedly rolling out to mobile users. Tap the + icon in your library, and you should see a new “folder” option. You can even play an entire folder of playlists, or shuffle them.
The billionaire CEO is starting to realize that he needs to solve autonomy before he can have a robotaxi business.
On The Vergecast: What’s next for Apple, the Xbox is back, and the Mythos mythology.
It may have a new design, but there’s still no proof this isn’t vaporware.
As Reuters reports, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced plans for a bill barring teens from social media until “January 1st the year a child turns 16,” similar to Australia’s.
“I can now confirm that we are planning to submit a bill to the Parliament before the end of the year. We are introducing this legislation because we want a childhood where children get to be children. Play, friendships, and everyday life must not be taken over by algorithms and screens.”
After moving its Nebula projector lineup under its audio brand last year, Anker has announced through its Chinese social media channels that it’s renaming Soundcore to Anker Audio-Visual, according to Notebookcheck and ITHome. It’s not yet known if this change is limited to China or if there will be a different name as part of a broader global rebranding.
It would add protections for many states, but also likely strip some from others.
Android Headlines spotted an unlisted promo video for the I/O pre-show’s second year, since removed from the Android YouTube channel. Apparently the show will stream at 1PM ET on May 12th, a week before I/O on May 19th, and will tee up “one of the biggest years for Android yet.”
[Android Headlines]
The new Instants app allows users to share disappearing, unedited photos and videos with friends.
OpenAI says its new GPT-5.5 model is its “smartest and most intuitive” model yet. That’s probably true, and yet…
ev:
OpenAI says a lot of things
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DeepSeek says the V4 model can compete toe-to-toe with leading American systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
‘A photograph captures light on a sensor or film. It is a record of a physical moment.’
GitHub uses a queue for developers when lots of people are working on a single project. It’s designed to avoid changes clashing and developers breaking things, but yesterday it failed in a catastrophic way thanks to a bug that randomly reverted previously merged commits (code snapshots). GitHub also had other outages yesterday, on the same day I reported on employee concerns about GitHub reliability and leadership.
He threatened to “put a big tariff on the UK” if it doesn’t drop its tax on the revenue of tech giants, despite the Supreme Court ruling that he can’t actually do that. The president still thinks the tax, which brought in £944m ($1.3bn) last year, unfairly targets US companies.
[The Telegraph]
Prosecutors allege Gannon Ken Van Dyke had sense his Polymarket bets would pay off, since he was part of the operation.
Discord Nitro subscribers are about to get a more limited version of Xbox Game Pass.
Anthropic says the new app connectors are available to all Claude users, ‘with mobile in beta.’
Microsoft has scrapped Microsoft Gaming in favor of Xbox today, and it’s also starting to roll out a new Xbox logo. The new logo started appearing on Microsoft’s campus this week, just in time for Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s all-hands meeting earlier today. The new Xbox logo has a more glassy look, and I understand Microsoft has also been using this new design for some of its internal Project Helix materials.
The FCC is asking loaded questions about ‘transgender and gender nonbinary programming’ aimed at kids.
Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics (LAVA) is the tool NASA uses to model reentry, aerodynamics, and fluid dynamics for Mars landers and the SLS (Space Launch System) that launched Artemis II. And now it’s available for researchers and commercial aerospace companies, even those without a supercomputer:
Aerospace engineers rely on “scale-resolving simulations” to capture high-fidelity renderings of phenomena that can have profound effects on missions, including pressure waves, turbulent swirls, and acoustic signatures. Those were once resource- and time-consuming. Now, LAVA runs them on modest computing resources, making them readily available and easy to produce, even for novice users.
DirecTV now supports mixed reality with its new app for the Quest 2, 3, 3S, and even Pro headsets. There’s live TV for subscribers, plus on-demand and ad-supported content anyone can watch, available in the app store or through the Horizon TV hub Meta launched last year.
You can save a lot of money buying like-new versus new, and these speakers come with the same one-year warranty.
Meta is making the cuts to help ‘offset the other investments we’re making.’
Microsoft’s new Xbox leader starts to talk strategy for the company’s gaming business.
Asha Sharma has a new strategy for her return of Xbox.
There’s no good excuse for letting hackers into an AI model too dangerous for public release.
The new model ‘excels’ at tasks like writing and debugging code and doing work across different tools.
You still inflate it with a pump, but with an added metal frame this chair won’t bounce around a room like a balloon.
This hub holds certain settings that work across Meta’s apps and allows for using a single password for access across all accounts and managing passkeys.
Any accounts users currently have connected in Meta’s Account Center will automatically transfer to the new Meta Account that’s rolling out “over the next year.”
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Verge Score
Xbox is Microsoft’s gaming identity moving forward.
The dual-screen Zenbook Duo I reviewed in January was said to cost $2,399.99 with an Intel Core Ultra X9 388H. Now preorders are open, but a base model costs $2,499.99 and the 388H configuration I tested will be $2,699.99. Ouch.
We reached out to Asus for the reason, but company reps did not immediately reply. Seems like RAMageddon claims another.
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Plus, we found deals on Skullcandy’s budget-friendly noise-canceling wireless earbuds and a lego cactus set.
The hosting platform provided a new update on the recent compromise. It named Context.AI as the vector for the attack, found more customer data that had been stolen, and said it discovered that some accounts had been broken into during an earlier incident.
First, we have identified a small number of additional accounts that were compromised as part of this incident. Second, we have uncovered a small number of customer accounts with evidence of prior compromise that is independent of and predates this incident, potentially as a result of social engineering, malware, or other methods.
