Analysis | The Verge

Will a new CEO help realize Apple’s smart home potential?

2026-04-22T13:03:37-04:00

It took Tim Cook years to launch Apple into major new hardware categories, such as the smartwatch. But John Ternus could start his tenure right away with an ambitious new project: smart home hardware.

All signs point to a strong lineup of new smart home devices coming potentially this fall, putting Apple back in the game in a category where it has been painfully slow to ship new devices.

With a hardware man at the helm in Ternus, the chances of Apple fully committing to the smart home feel far higher than under Cook. And while, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Ternus was reluctant to invest deeply in the smart home a decade ago - tak …

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Call of Duty never made much sense for Xbox Game Pass

2026-04-22T09:41:12-04:00

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. | Image: Activision Blizzard

Yesterday Microsoft announced some surprising news: at a time when everything in gaming is getting more expensive, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate was actually getting a price cut. Going forward, the subscription service will drop from $29.99 to $22.99 per month, less than a year after getting a major hike. But there's a caveat. Along with the cheaper price, Microsoft also announced that future Call of Duty games will no longer be available through Game Pass at launch.

It's the end to a strange experiment from Microsoft, in which it attempted to boost its subscription service at the expense of selling Call of Duty games, which also happens to be on …

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First vacuums — then the world

2026-04-22T09:49:39-04:00

Many startups spend years trying to become a household name. Others just spend $10 million on a Super Bowl ad. That's Dreame's bet. The little-known Chinese robot vacuum company has grand ambitions to become a global consumer electronics giant and chose to run a pricey 30-second spot as its opening move. If it works, the ad may be remembered as the beginning of the rise of the next global tech powerhouse. If it doesn't? Well, let's just say Quibi ran a Super Bowl ad, too.

Dreame's CEO wants to be the Chinese Elon Musk

Dreame - pronounced dreamy - used its half-minute of exposure to promise a dizzying product evolution: from robot vacuums a …

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The Mac is in good hands in Apple’s post-Cook era

2026-04-21T13:25:17-04:00

The Mac reached a series of low points in the Tim Cook era: the fiasco of the butterfly keyboard, the clunky transition to USB-C, the underutilized potential of the Touch Bar, and the occasionally lackluster Intel chip performance. For a while, it seemed like Apple had shifted all of its attention, innovation, and care toward the iPad. For Mac users, it was a rough stretch of time.

And then, with the transition to Apple Silicon in 2020, everything changed. The line was revitalized with hugely capable new chips, and Apple began prioritizing usability over thinness at all costs. The Mac is now in a new golden era, and yesterday's changes at A …

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John Ternus’ first big problem is AI

2026-04-21T11:11:38-04:00

Less than a year ago, Apple made headlines for a lack of AI announcements at its annual WWDC event. Ten months later, the company has announced that hardware executive John Ternus will succeed longtime CEO Tim Cook as chief executive - and the official release doesn't mention AI once.

Ternus, currently Apple's SVP of hardware engineering, will take over as CEO on September 1st, after Cook's decade and a half in the role. Ternus is a 25-year veteran of the company and the first Apple CEO in about 30 years to come from the hardware sector. According to Apple, he's led hardware engineering work for every model of iPad, as well as the most rec …

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Tim Cook will still be Apple’s Trump whisperer

2026-04-21T08:16:36-04:00

Though Tim Cook is shedding his CEO title for the role of Apple's executive chairman, it appears he'll keep one of his most important duties: that of the company's Trump whisperer.

"As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world," Apple writes in a press release. Translation: he's sticking around to deal with thorny political relationships - in particular the one with President Donald Trump.

Throughout his tenure, Cook has navigated Apple through tricky political terrain. He's had to balance the company's massive business interest in China with US policymak …

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Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want

2026-04-20T16:19:49-04:00

The long-term risks of the All-In Podcast, illustrated. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Turbosquid, Getty Images

One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he'd made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers!

He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing.

…

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The South Korean president is doing quote-post diplomacy

2026-04-16T22:21:36-04:00

"This is no different from Comfort Women or the Holocaust," wrote South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on X last week, quoting a post with a video of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers throwing a body off a rooftop in Gaza.

The president's post kicked off an internet firestorm for a thousand different reasons, not least because the video in question was misleadingly labeled. The quoted post reads "LIVE FOOTAGE: IDF soldiers tortured a Palestinian kid and threw him off a roof." The video was actually from September 2024, and depicted Israeli soldiers kicking, dragging, and eventually hurling a limp body from a rooftop. The incident - involving …

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The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

2026-04-17T09:23:51-04:00

All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe's time has come. The Creative Cloud provider's suite of design tools have been considered the industry standard for decades - despite unpopular decisions to fully embrace generative AI and abandon software licenses in favor of expensive, complicated subscriptions.

Pricing in particular has given competitors an opening to attack. Some of the best alternatives aren't just undercutting Adobe's price - they're available for free. People love free.

One example that was announced this week is Autograph, motion design software akin to Ado …

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The perfect successor to Lost has been hiding from me for years

2026-04-15T09:54:51-04:00

Ever since Jack decided to stay behind in 2010, I've been searching for something to give me the same feeling that Lost did. I crave a big mystery with a huge cast and more secrets than I can handle, something that prompts me and my friends to share nonsensical theories about what's really going on. It's been 16 years and my search has been filled with disappointment. Yellowjackets initially seemed like exactly what I wanted until its downslide began, while promising shows like 1899 were cancelled before they had a chance to really get started. It turns out that the perfect Lost successor has actually been airing for years, but because of th …

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