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Verge Score
Apple’s first foldable is an early adopter special.
Verge subscribers can get their burning questions answered.
More importantly, is this how we bring back the iPhone Mini?
You can still get an iPhone Duo in store on Friday.
Following Apple’s smart home-focused launch earlier in the month, Apple is hosting another product event soon.
We have Peter Thiel’s secret lectures about the Antichrist.
What three hours of a documentary looks like to someone who spent four months at the Holmes trial.
It’s okay to marvel at the stunt — it’s pure spectacle.
$800 now buys you a follow-me drone instead of an FPV flight experience.
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is quietly one of the console’s most important games.
Square Enix’s latest HD-2D game carries the Final Fantasy name — and a lot of what makes the franchise great.
New tech and gameplay improvements make it easier to get into Nintendo’s defining title.
Eight new releases including old-school horror, laid-back dressmaking, and the return of Castlevania.
OpenAI, Meta, and Google want AI agents to do everything for you. But popular services on the web aren’t letting that happen.
The AI agents carried out the attacks with little involvement from the human hacker.
It’s like using cloud-based AI tools, but the privacy makes it more appealing.
You may have consented to sharing with Muse, but all your friends sure didn’t.
The KickerOctober 21
YouTube creators, on their own videos, will have the dislike button moved behind the three-dot menu, but that’s not the case for regular users.
Tesla has set a Q2 2027 target to let owners opt their cars into its robotaxi network—a major promise, but one that comes with a history of missed deadlines and steep regulatory hurdles.
Even though Mass Effect developer BioWare has been shut down, IGN reports that Amazon is still working on the Prime Video series, citing “sources inside Prime Video.”
I asked both EA and Amazon about the status of the show today, and both companies declined to comment.
New research out of Texas shows how data centers are driving up pollution.
AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:
It said in a filing that Zuckerberg “was evaluating relocating his primary residence” if California’s Proposition 40 passes. As Bloomberg reports, Meta’s board issued special shares so that he wouldn’t have to leave:
Zuckerberg gets non-voting shares he can sell for liquidity without reducing his voting control. In return, he has committed to remain in California — or wherever Meta is headquartered — for eight years while he remains in a full-time leadership role.
That’s according to Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s earnings call today. He also says that “About 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day. For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better the retention seems to get.”
This week, Sensor Tower reported that the Muse app had hit 10 million US downloads.
I just left two prize packages with FedEx today, and yet I’ve still got plenty more in the Today I’m Toying With giveaway! I start a new giveaway each Wednesday, each runs for one week, and you can enter every week — as long as you do before each deadline of 9AM ET Wednesday. We’re now on Giveaway #17. Tell a friend!
TechCrunch reports that layoffs have hit the company’s “communications team, social team, WordPress.com, and its VIP enterprise business.” It’s unclear how many have been laid off.
Automattic’s head of comms, Chenda Ngak, gave this statement to The Verge — “We’re staggering our organizational changes to be more generous with severance and allow more time with each Automattician.” — and said she had nothing else to add.
The cuts follow CEO Matt Mullenweg being briefly placed on leave in September.
Update: Added Automattic statement.
Microsoft’s annual report reveals the company employed around 223,000 people as of June 30th. That’s 5,000 less than the 228,000 people employed in 2025. It’s the first time Microsoft has had a headcount reduction in 10 years, after the gutting of the Nokia phone business in 2015 and 2016. The reduction comes as Microsoft has laid off more than 9,000 employees over the past year.
[Microsoft]
Meta says the new class of shares will also fund acquisitions and employee compensation.
Meta’s third-quarter earnings report shows it spent $9.89 billion paying for its settlement with US attorney generals.
OpenAI is taking credit for finding the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, but now someone has to apply all these patches,
Flat revenue and a 4 percent profit drop show that no amount of rocket thrusters can disguise Tesla’s troubles.
Bose will leverage Skullcandy’s designs and branding to help the company attract new users.
Airbnb’s new rules limit hosts to ‘reasonable’ requests like putting dirty dishes in the sink.
Claude Duet is Anthropic’s new agent for professionals and small business owners, and it’s launching as a research preview.
While Amazon shuts out AI agents, Walmart is letting them in.
Adam Savage shared a captivating half hour video of him exploring many of the detailed stop-motion puppets Laika Studios created for its new animated film, Wildwood. The studio’s animators already revealed that their puppets now have internal diaphragm’s making them appear to breath, but several of the puppets also have hidden mechanisms in their arms making biceps automatically flex as they’re moved.
This is so rad — and if you have a Quest 3 or 3S and a copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee (1.02), you can try it too. It’s called Xelee, and yes, the mixed reality part is AI-coded: “Claude wrote every line of code.” The game part is from the Melee decompilation, though. I hope game companies are paying attention to the possibilities in this brave new world!
It’s significantly more than it agreed to pay in a recent kids online safety settlement.
Along with the new Cyberpunk anime season, CD Projekt Red has major game updates for both new and returning players.
Xbox employees close to Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters will need to come into the office more starting in February.
The character-driven strategy game won me over with impeccable vibes, and it’s even more appealing with a discount.
Microsoft is opening up Xbox Cloud Gaming to anyone in November.
General Motors is cutting development times in half, introducing a 40x more powerful central compute unit, and rolling out autonomous driving to its highest-volume trucks and SUVs.
TP-Link wants to make routers in Mississippi, but it’s not ready to commit yet.
The slim, wall-mounted TV can display paintings and photographs when you’re not watching your favorite shows.
As announced last year, Chrome will now show a warning when you visit public websites without an encrypted HTTPS connection. The new warnings will appear the first time you visit a site without a secure connection. If you continue to the site, Google won’t present the warning for another two weeks.
I’ve been absorbing every iPhone Duo review I can find (after ours), so I thought I’d share links to a few others that I liked:
What have been your favorite reviews?
The company is launching ads for ChatGPT Free and Go users across 26 countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Since bringing ads to ChatGPT in the US in February, OpenAI has rapidly expanded its advertising efforts, which now span 89 countries.
Supernatural is relaunching in early access, but it comes with a higher subscription price.
It’s apparently available in the iOS 27 release candidate, according to Creative Strategies analyst Max Weinbach. Things could always change ahead of the public release full release, but the feature seems likely to make the final cut.
When Apple first announced the foldable, it said Apple Pencil support would arrive “later this year.”
Apple is giving Apple Music a rebrand, including a new sound composed by British producer Fred Again and Nest Acoustics.
OpenAI says a security researcher at Calif used GPT-5.6 Sol to identify PHP exploits before attackers did, and has shared a tool that lets developers check if they’re using a potentially vulnerable version of PHP that needs patching. Ami Luttwak, co-founder of Google’s Wiz security team that also helped to identidy the PHP2Shell exploit, told the Wall Street Journal that its “the most severe AI vulnerability that was ever found.”
We have the iPhone Duo. A couple of them, in fact. And we have a lot to discuss. Allison Johnson and I will be live at 1PM talking about The Verge’s Duo review, her experience with the phone, and as many of your questions as we can answer. Come hang! Bring feelings!
First announced in September, the headset has a recommended retail price of $99.99 and will be available starting November 19th (the same day GTA VI launches), with pre-orders opening at 10AM ET on October 29th.
Sony is promising to share more details on the step-up Pulse Edge headset model, which includes active noise cancellation and a detachable boom mic, ahead of its planned launch next year.