The Surface Pro 9. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Panos Panay has always been the force behind Microsoft’s Surface line. He helped bring Surface to life as a secret project more than 10 years ago. He’s presented the new devices onstage at events, showed up at malls to promote Surface hardware, and has steered Microsoft’s Surface tablets to success in the years since. Now, he’s leaving in a surprise departure announced just days before Microsoft’s next big Surface event. Panay will no longer be presenting at Microsoft’s showcase on Thursday but will remain at the company…
Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Tech leaders called for regulation that balances innovation and safety as the Senate conducted one of the many “insight forums” to inform potential rulemaking. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) invited leaders in the AI space, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Nvidia president Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and X chair Elon Musk to a bipartisan AI Insight Forum. The forum was closed to the public and media, but some tech leaders prepared remarks or spoke to reporters outside the event. Zuckerberg said in…
Image: Spike Chunsoft A Japanese court has convicted a man of violating copyright law after he uploaded gameplay and anime videos without publisher permission. Reported by Japanese paper Asahi Shimbun, the 53-year-old man, Shinobu Yoshida, was sentenced to two years in prison and assessed a 1 million yen fine (or about $6,700 USD.) Yoshida was arrested in May of this year after uploading gameplay videos of the visual novel Steins;Gate: My Darling’s Embrace back in 2019. According to a press release from the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), a Japanese anti-piracy trade group, the complaint apparently stemmed from the fact…
The Q8 Max is one of two new robot vacuums from Roborock. It features dual roller brushes, obstacle avoidance, and smart mapping features. | Image: Roborock Robot vacuum manufacturer Roborock announced three new vacuum products at IFA 2023, the global tech show taking place in Berlin this week: the Q5 Pro robot vac; the Q8 Max robot vac; and the Dyad Pro Combo wet / dry stick vacuum. The new lidar-powered robot vacuums add more than double the suction power of previous models, a new and more advanced DuoRoller brush system, and more app features for a lower price. The…
Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI) is among the prominent voices in Congress advocating for a smooth transition to electric vehicles. Dingell, who was first elected in 2015, represents suburban Detroit, home to a large swath of the American car industry and the labor force that builds those vehicles. I spoke with Dingell, a former GM executive who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, about the pressing issues facing legislators as the country races to make EVs dominant. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. You’ve been supportive of laws that…
A view showing the parts of the world covered by SATLAS using images from Sentinel-2 satellites. | Image: Allen Institute for AI A first-of-its-kind map of renewable energy projects and tree coverage around the world launched today, and it uses generative AI to essentially sharpen images taken from space. It’s all part of a new tool called Satlas from the Allen Institute for AI, founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The tool, shared first with The Verge, uses satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites. But those images still give a pretty blurry view of the ground. The…
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here. Today let’s talk about one of the most important cases that Meta’s Oversight Board has heard to date — and how the process ultimately revealed a fundamental problem with with the board’s operations. I. Our story takes place in Cambodia, which for the past 38 years has been ruled by a dictator named Hun Sen. Since first taking office, the Cambodian leader has gradually consolidated power, regularly using violence and intimidation…
My 2021 iPad Pro 11-inch. | Image: Wes Davis / The Verge As the third tier of Apple’s connected personal computing devices, the iPad sits in an awkward place in 2023. It’s a supremely capable product, there’s no doubt about that. It’s powerful and responsive; most of the models have beautiful screens; and its interface is friendly. But it’s also incomplete and insistent on doing things the Apple-prescribed way. And even as it dominates the tablet landscape, sales of iPads have withered since 2020, as Mark Gurman noted in Bloomberg today. In short: it needs more. To be clear, I…
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures Dune: Part Two has been delayed to March 15th, 2024, according to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, and it’s just one of a few big shifts in Warner Bros.’ movie slate. The films are moving around amid the ongoing strikes in Hollywood that have affected production and promotion on many films and TV shows. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has a new date, too, moving from March 15th to April 12th. The upcoming Lord of the Rings anime, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, is shifting from April 12th to December…
Illustration: The Verge Google is making some changes to ads transparency and its data that’s available for researchers to comply with Europe’s Digital Services Act, according to a blog post published Thursday. Regarding ads transparency, the company says that it will be “expanding” its Ads Transparency Center to “meet specific DSA provisions and providing additional information on targeting for ads served in the European Union,” Google’s Laurie Richardson and Jennifer Flannery O’Connor write in the post. The center, which Google launched earlier this year, is a searchable repository that lets you find out more about the ads you see on…
Illustration: The Verge Meta will launch the web version of Threads, its competitor to X (formerly known as Twitter) early this week, reports The Wall Street Journal. A web version has been frustratingly missing since the short-form posting service began. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is working on adding the feature along with better search (well, search at all, really — right now, you can only search for usernames on the platform) earlier this month, and that it would be ready in “the next few weeks.” However, WSJ writes, its sources say the feature’s “launch plans aren’t final…
Illustration: The Verge Threads is adding reposts (aka retweets) to its reverse-chronological “Following” feed, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced in a Threads post on Thursday. It’s a small but nice addition to the app that makes the Following feed a bit more useful, and while Mosseri said Meta added it “based on your feedback,” the Following feed does still have its flaws. That’s not the only repost-related update from Meta. It’s also rolling out a reposts tab on your profile so that you and others can more easily find the threads that you’ve reposted. I don’t appear to have either…
Image: Windows Report Valve’s Steam Deck might be getting more competition. Last month, Windows Central reported that Lenovo is working on a handheld gaming PC that runs Windows called the Legion Go, and on Wednesday, Windows Report published what appear to be the first images of the upcoming device. Based on the images, Lenovo’s take on a PC gaming handheld looks a lot like devices such as the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally, but it also has a lot in common with the Nintendo Switch. According to Windows Report, the Legion Go has an eight-inch screen, images show two…
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Today’s kids are tech-savvy at a very young age, but you might not want your children sitting down in front of a PS5 without some guardrails in place. Sony has built parental controls right into the software for its console, and they can be used in combination with the user profiles feature to put limits on what your kids are able to do. These limits cover everything from the number of hours your kid can spend gaming to how much they can spend on in-game purchases, and it all ties into the accounts…
The M2 Max model of the MacBook Pro 16. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Over the weekend, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman dug into the specs of a Mac Mini in testing with the new generation of Apple Silicon, and today, he’s reporting that in the high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro, at least one version of the M3 Max chip seen in testing contains 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores as well as up to 48GB of memory. Extensive rumors about Apple’s hardware refresh cycle are a sign summer is ending and we’re moving into the fall, and…
Google’s sample of the code scanner API auto-zoom. | Image: Google You might soon not have as much trouble reading far away QR codes on your Android phone. Google is working on a new code scanner that automatically detects a QR code in the camera frame, zooms in, and reads it. The feature isn’t quite making its way to devices just yet — but it’s in the latest APIs Google is making available to developers. Specifically, it’s Google’s code scanner API that’s been updated with the new ability. It works in Google’s QR Code Scanner system app, but can also…
Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl. | Image: Warner Music Group The music industry was reshaped by streaming. So earlier this year, Warner Music Group put a streaming executive in charge. The company’s new CEO, Robert Kyncl, was most recently the chief business officer of YouTube, where he helped transform the platform into one of the biggest names in creator monetization and streaming music. Before that, he was vice president of content at Netflix, working on partnerships as it entered the streaming era. Next month, Kyncl will sit down with Vox senior correspondent Peter Kafka to talk all things music…
Image: Nick Barclay / The Verge Facebook and Instagram users see wildly different political news in their feeds depending on their political beliefs, but chronological feeds won’t fix the problem with polarization, new research published Thursday suggests. The findings come from four papers produced through a partnership between Meta and more than a dozen outside academics to research the impact of Facebook and Instagram on user behavior during the 2020 election. The company supplied data from around 208 million US-based active users in aggregate, totaling nearly all of the 231 million Facebook and Instagram users nationwide at the time. Turns…
Image: TikTok TikTok users can now post text-based updates in addition to videos and series of photos — just as platforms like Meta’s Threads are vying to take on Twitter’s microblogging dominance. Text posts appear similar to Instagram Stories visually: users can add a background color, edit how text appears, and add music and stickers to the post. Posts have a 1,000-character limit (yes, I tested it to find out). Other users can also engage with the post similar to how they interact with video — by stitching, dueting, and commenting. Seeing the company responsible for the tidal wave of…