The tech story that made the biggest impact on me yesterday was Sam Byford’s “Living a Google-free life with a Huawei phone.” In the run up to the launch of Huawei’s new flagship P40 line, he got himself a Mate 30 Pro and used it to see what Android is like sans Google. This is,…
The underground labs of the original Half-Life were set somewhere among New Mexico’s towering desert canyons. It wasn’t your prototypical blockbuster locale, but it was still Hollywood-esque, reminiscent of Cold War-era sci-fi films like Them!, where US Army men battled against giant irradiated ants below a blistering American sun. The setting of Half-Life’s sequel, on…
The headline on this story — never buy hardware today based on a promise of software tomorrow — doesn’t really apply to the new iPad Pro, which I reviewed yesterday. But I’ve been thinking about it ever since I hit the publish button. The phrase is a mantra we repeat over and over here at…
Half-Life: Alyx is definitely not Half-Life 3. It is a full-fledged game that expands the Half-Life universe. And City 17’s exploding barrel industry is still going strong. These are answers to some big questions Valve Software raised last year when it announced the first new Half-Life game since 2007 — but exclusively for virtual reality.…
By now most Americans have gotten the message that, as much as possible, they need to stay away from everyone else. In San Francisco and a growing number of other cities around the world, all non-essential travel has been banned. Even in cases where life more closely resembles normalcy, the government has encouraged social distancing.…
Apple has spent the past 10 years trying to convince everyone that the iPad and its vision of touch-friendly computing is the future. The iPad rejected the idea of a keyboard, a trackpad, or even a stylus, and Apple mocked Microsoft for taking that exact approach with the Surface. “Our competition is different, they’re confused,”…
I felt personally attacked by Apple yesterday, specifically by the marketing copy it used to promote the new iPad Pro: “Your next computer is not a computer.” This newsletter, Processor, is also (and originally) the name for the tech-focused video essays that I sometimes make. The very first one kicked off by asking the same…
If you’re now working at home due to the COVID-19 outbreak, you may have a moment when you realize that your Wi-Fi just isn’t cutting it anymore — it could be a frozen video feed, a rainbow spinner on your screen, or a cry from your kids when their favorite game doesn’t load. Here are…
As we settle in to the new reality of a locked-down, socially distant world, big tech is getting ready to start talking — and maybe even releasing — new consumer tech products. We’ve got rumors of the new flagship Motorola phone, a new speaker operating system from Sonos, and more. Sony’s also going to try…
In the era of social distancing that many of us now live in as part of a worldwide effort to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, tons of people are now stuck at home for days or even weeks, discouraged from meeting in public places or hanging out in large groups. That means…
Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet isn’t just a great comedy about video games, but a strand connecting an older, weirder era of its culture to the more mainstream world of workplace comedies. Few people on the show exemplify this more than Ashly Burch, a writer on Mythic Quest who also plays Rachel, a wide-eyed game tester…
Violence becomes him. Stalking through the wild grass and brutalist concrete wilderness of Tarkov, he’s implacable, the unstoppable force you’ve always secretly wanted to see come up against an object that claims to be immovable. He sees an enemy unaware. He snarls. The sights come up instinctively. In the pause before the man drops, you…
If Wednesday was the day where the full magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis became clear to many Americans, Thursday was the day that the country seemed to enter shock. By now, a significant portion of the Silicon Valley workforce is working, or pretending to, from home, giving everyone near-unlimited time to refresh Twitter, Instagram, and…
Upon its release in 1998, Half-Life instantly became my favorite game of all time. That wasn’t saying much, really, since we’d only just set up our first family computer, and I’d barely started playing video games. But history has proven my hot take to be a pretty solid one — Half-Life’s blend of first-person shooting…
The coronavirus is officially a pandemic and it has overshadowed quite a lot of other news. We’ve got stories on all the big news from yesterday, including the president’s speech and the NBA season getting suspended. But that other news goes on, and it turns out I have a lot of little things to say…
We’ve all been there: you have a sudden itch to watch a specific movie, and, after a cursory search of Netflix, you realize it’s not there. Next step: Google. Type in a search query for where that particular movie is streaming. It’s not on Hulu or Amazon Prime Video. It is, however, available via HBO…
“hello im a detective i solve every mystery” reads the Twitter bio of the Frog Detective, who’s widely known as the second-best detective in the fictional universe of his very own adventure game. As a whodunnit, The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game follows the plucky, amphibious investigator as he gets to the bottom of…
Last week, as COVID-19 began its spread around the globe, I noted here that the epidemic had prompted a notable change in the big tech platforms. Where they were once loath to intervene in the affairs of their own algorithms, even when the potential harms to public health were clear, the arrival of a novel…
The week of iOS 14-based leaks continues, with hints about new Apple hardware and a new home screen view. The rumored list for apps on the home screen view strikes me as particularly interesting and particularly likely. Cracks about it copying Windows Phone aside, it seems likely to me because it also mimics a lot…
In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film about a pandemic, Contagion, is seeing a spike in viewing. The problem is that Contagion isn’t streaming anywhere — especially in the United States — leading to an increase in rentals on iTunes and torrent downloads. The Verge partnered with TorrentFreak to examine the…
What is Quibi? Is it the final frontier in the streaming wars? Is it vaporware that’s managed to secure nearly $2 billion in investment funding before it’s even launched? Is it going to be the next big thing people spend time watching while in the bathroom? No one really knows. Founder Jeffrey Katzenberg sees it…
Netflix’s Castlevania is the rare video game adaptation that’s actually worth watching. Executive produced by Adi Shankar and written by prolific comics author Warren Ellis, it remixes the classic gothic series into a bloody anime-influenced adventure featuring some of the games’ biggest characters. Yesterday, Netflix released a third season that’s longer, weirder, and more ambitious…
Roku just reported a strong holiday quarter, which doesn’t really come as a surprise: there’s no time of year when people buy more streaming boxes, sticks, or new TVs that happen to run Roku’s software. The company ended 2019 with 36.9 million active accounts, and customers streamed 11.7 billion hours of content in the fourth…
Fighting games are different than other types of video games. A lot of titles — think action games like Control or Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order — are about giving you the feeling of becoming more powerful over the course of the game, or just being powerful from the get-go. However, fighting games and other…