Last night, the Trump administration issued a pair of stunning executive orders against Chinese technology companies, banning US transactions with the companies after a deadline of September 20th. Most of the immediate focus has been on TikTok, which was targeted through its parent company ByteDance — but the second order could have a far more…
Outside of its hardware announcements, one of the bigger takeaways from yesterday’s Samsung event was its ever-closer relationship with Microsoft. The two companies are partnering together on everything from mobile gaming bundles, to optimizing their apps and integrating their software. They even announced that you’ll soon be able to use and control multiple apps from…
Samsung’s big Unpacked event went off with just a few hitches. It’s nice to know that even when an event is online some kind of logistical issue can cause AV problems and delay the beginning of a keynote. Makes everything feel a little more normal. I tease — the event itself was actually well executed.…
Samsung’s first look at the upcoming Galaxy Z Fold 2 during its Unpacked event seemed to spend more time focusing on how the new model fixes the flaws of the original rather than emphasizing whatever will make the foldable flagship great. In putting so much effort into convincing customers that this time it got things…
Programming note: It’s time for our summer vacation! The stretch between January and today is the longest uninterrupted period we have ever written The Interface, and so we’re taking a break to recharge. We return August 17th. On any other day, the memo that Kevin Mayer published Wednesday might have been the talk of the…
Based on wallpaper by Michael Gillett (Wallpaper Hub) Forty-five days to close the deal At first glance, a Microsoft acquisition of TikTok seems a little unusual. Microsoft has spent years walking back consumer plays like the Groove Music service, the Kinect Xbox accessory, its Microsoft Band fitness device, Windows Phone, and more recently the Mixer…
Well, we had an antitrust hearing. A long one, too. The House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the market power of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google ran to nearly six hours, accounting for a handful of delays and intermissions. Alternating Democrats and Republicans asked the CEOs of those companies a combined 217 questions, ranging from pointed…
For the past week, Nintendo fans have resembled digital archaeologists. Following a massive leak of source code and other internal documents — appropriately dubbed the gigaleak — previously unknown details from the company’s biggest games have steadily trickled out. Those poring over the code have uncovered a new Animal Crossing villager, early prototypes for games…
A spectacular comeback for a Microsoft icon Let’s play a quick game of word association: Microsoft — Windows? Excel? Xbox? All solid answers. But for me, for a while in the ‘90s at least, I would have immediately answered “Flight Simulator.” Microsoft Flight Simulator is the very first thing I can remember ever doing on…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The ultimate autocomplete The most exciting new arrival in the world of AI looks, on the surface, disarmingly simple. It’s not some subtle game-playing program that can outthink humanity’s finest or a mechanically advanced robot that backflips like an Olympian. No, it’s merely an autocomplete program, like the…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. For years, Razer has set the standard for making gaming laptops that are compact, slim, and feel great to use. MSI wants to end that streak, and its new GS66 Stealth is actually a viable alternative, at…
Rodney Mullen.Photo: Activision Rodney Mullen, Chad Muska, and Bucky Lasek on the series’s lasting impact Rodney Mullen still remembers the first time he went on tour after appearing in a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game. Mullen is widely regarded as one of the most influential skaters of all time, credited with creating many of the…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. The biggest question about the Blade Stealth 13 isn’t actually about the Blade Stealth 13. It’s about the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, the best ultraportable gaming laptop ever made. For a while, that title belonged to the…
How MSCHF managed to dominate the internet — with fun! Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / Alex Castro / The Verge Here is the first honorable use of venture capital: using the funds to design, prototype, test, and then build a rubber chicken pipe to smoke weed out of. The first time I saw Puff The…
Microsoft is gearing up for a different Xbox future If you were heading into Microsoft’s Xbox game showcase yesterday to witness a demonstration of why next-gen gaming and the “world’s most powerful console” matter, you were probably left a little disappointed. Microsoft’s event featured a solid showcase for the future of Xbox and Xbox Game…
Ask any fan of Star Wars what they most yearn to reenact in a video game, and they’ll likely tell you two things: lightsaber duels and space battles. Last year’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order from Respawn gave us the first in a strong and sleek package. Now, another Electronic Arts studio — the Canadian…
Amid hosts of reasonable fears about the coronavirus pandemic, there’s also one far more dubious threat: “COVID parties.” As Wired explains in a good exploration of the topic, COVID parties (or “corona parties”) are events where people supposedly expose themselves to the coronavirus on purpose. Medical professionals and government officials have periodically warned about these…
Photo by Joseph Okpako / WireImage Filed under: Entertainment The singer of My Immortal (the song) has now read My Immortal (the fanfic) If you mention the name “My Immortal,” you may mean one of two things. The first is the 2003 hit song from rock band Evanescence. The second is a Harry Potter fanfic…
I. A week from now, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will be among the CEOs appearing before the House of Representatives’ antitrust committee. Today let’s check in on how the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case is developing. The first thing to say is that the case is developing slower than expected. Once on track to wrap up…
Dell’s G5 15 SE is focused. It’s not the best-looking gaming laptop or the fastest out there, but starting at $879.99, its AMD Ryzen processor and RX 5600M graphics chip make for a great tag team. Along with other speedy components like fast RAM, an NVMe SSD, and a 144Hz refresh rate display, this Dell…
It’s been such a newsy week that we’re ending it with two columns — enough to last you the whole weekend. First, we have what we hope is the ultimate Twitter hack FAQ, in response to this week’s catastrophic security breach. Yesterday’s issue was the most-read in Interface history, and we wanted to make sure…
Microsoft is planning to launch its game streaming service, currently known as Project xCloud, free to its paying Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers in September. The xCloud service will allow Xbox players to play games on mobile devices or even start a game on their consoles and resume it on their phone or tablet. Xbox…
Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Librarians are using the activities to keep communities entertained and informed On the day the Peters Township Public Library in McMurray, Pennsylvania, was supposed to unveil a superhero-themed escape room, the library had to close its doors due to the coronavirus pandemic. With no physical location to work…
You can’t say you didn’t see it coming. Whatever Twitter eventually comes to say about the events of July 15th, 2020, when it suffered the most catastrophic security breach in company history, it must be said that the events were set in motion years ago. Beginning in the spring of 2018, scammers began to impersonate…
Peacock is NBCUniversal’s new streaming service and the last major entrant in the colloquial streaming wars. But Gidon Katz, the company’s president of direct to consumer, believes Peacock can win by leaning into something most of its biggest competitors won’t: offering premium entertainment, mostly for free. When Peacock launches tomorrow across the United States, people…
Filed under: Games Review The last big PS4 exclusive is a conflicted one Ghost of Tsushima is at its best when it’s quiet. The latest PS4 game from developer Sucker Punch is an attempt to merge the structure of a conventional open-world game with the setting of a classic samurai film. Think of it as…
For years, Apple has steadily revealed how the ARM-based chips in its mobile phones were catching up in performance to the beefier silicon you’d find inside a laptop or desktop — in 2018, the company claimed its new iPad Pro was faster than 92 percent of portable PCs. At some point, it seemed inevitable that…
A weird thing about running a tech company is that if you are very successful, at some point you will also be operating a vast quasi-legal system. Up to a certain point, one of your users complaining that they got locked out of their account is just a customer service problem. But after some threshold…
I. Yesterday we talked about how a recent social media conflict between journalists and the tech world might be better framed as a conflict between managers and their employees. Today I want to look at that conflict from another angle — how it played out on the buzzy, audio-only, invite-only social network Clubhouse. Like many…
Apple is standing behind its decision to reject future updates for the iOS app of new email service Hey. In a letter sent to Hey creator Basecamp and obtained by The Verge, Apple outlines the App Store rules it says the Hey app breaks and advises the company to adhere to developer guidelines if Basecamp…
If you’ve ever had an 18-inch satellite dish, you’ve enjoyed the work of Senator Ed Markey. Sen. Markey (D-MA) was there in 1992 as a US Representative when the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act was passed, which regulated cable service pricing, increased competition, and, in his eye, birthed the 18-inch satellite dish. He…
We live in the era of streaming entertainment, and it’s easier than ever to start watching whatever new Netflix, Prime Video, or Hulu show that your friends and co-workers are raving about. No matter if you’re looking for movies, sports, live TV, or anything else, you can probably stream it, and that’s why consumers have…
Lenovo’s Flex 5G has a lot to live up to as the world’s first 5G-enabled Windows 10 2-in-1 laptop. Not just that, it also needs to convince people that putting ARM-based processors in a Windows laptop is a perk, not a liability that spells incompatibility doom for those who rely on a lot of apps.…
I. A recurring theme of this newsletter is that I write about TikTok, make some dark prediction about its future, and then turn out to be totally wrong. In that spirit, I thought today we could look at the particularly newsy week the ByteDance-owned video app has had, and then contribute some additional speculation that…
On Thursday Snap held its second-ever partner summit as a virtual event, announcing a new suite of products and developer tools for Snapchat. The inaugural event was one of the more memorable tech productions I’ve been to — a high-energy keynote from CEO Evan Spiegel in front of giant vertical screens on a converted Hollywood…
After 90 days, Quibi’s free trial period has come to an end. Now, executives at the company have their biggest hurdle yet: getting people to willingly pay $5 or $8 a month for a service that most critics argue lacks exciting shows and flopped on launch. Quibi, a shortform video streaming service, is supposed to…
In April 2020, the weird and ambitious startup Magic Leap cut its workforce in half and delayed plans to take mixed reality glasses mainstream. The company had a wealth of ideas about how ordinary people might use its hardware, which overlays virtual images on reality. But after years of development, many were still prototypes or…
Tomorrow is July Fourth, or Independence Day if you live in the US. Like all major US holidays, there are some good sales happening on tech that are worth mentioning. We’ve listed the best ones we know about below, broken up by category. Many of them are happening through tomorrow night, so it’s best to…
Ubisoft on Thursday unveiled Hyper Scape, an all-new free-to-play battle royale (BR) shooter from the Montreal-based team behind Rainbow Six Siege that will attempt to carve out its own niche in the highly competitive genre. As first confirmed by leaks earlier this week, Hyper Scape is a much more futuristic-styled BR game set in a…
Congratulations! The world is falling apart (or at least feels like it’s falling apart), and you’ve decided to do something about it. That’s a commendable urge. Here’s where I tell you that you’ve also decided to do something very hard. Hosting a charity stream (on Twitch, YouTube, or on any other platform) is much more…
Rarely do we see so many ban hammers drop over a 48-hour period as we have seen this week. The big social platforms, who were once loath to intervene in matters of political speech, are getting much more comfortable with the idea. Today let’s look at what happened and why — and, for the sake…
Over the last week, dozens of developers, journalists, and streamers have come forward on Twitter with allegations of abuse they’ve endured as part of the video game industry. Their stories span several high-profile companies and include figures in powerful positions. While the sheer number of people speaking up at once is remarkable — and concurrent…
In this week’s edition of our Vergecast interview series, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and policy editor Russell Brandom talk with cybersecurity expert and founder of CryptoHarlem Matt Mitchell. Mitchell has worked with activists in the US to help them better understand the tools technology offers as well as the threats it can impose. On The…
Happy Worldwide Developer Conference to those who celebrate. I spent the weekend watching three stories unfold at the intersection of social networks and politics. Let’s take them in turn. I. During the initial George Floyd protests earlier this month, a big question was whether the social networks would take action against President Trump for one…
There is a plethora of streaming services available for anyone with a credit card handy. Hulu and Netflix are general entertainment providers offering licensed content and originals for subscribers. Others, like anime provider Crunchyroll and NFL Sunday Ticket, are targeted at specific interests. Streaming services like Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus are flashy newcomers…
Like many social media platforms and apps, TikTok feeds are built using a recommendation algorithm that uses a number of tools and factors to personalize it for each person. Now, TikTok has published a new blog post explaining how its recommendation feed works, and it includes tips for personalizing the feed to avoid being served…
Programming note: The Interface is off on Thursday. Back on Monday. It seems hard to believe now, but there was a time when political advertising was relatively uncontroversial. Sure, individual ads regularly proved to be controversial, from the nuclear provocations of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy” to racist fear-mongering of George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton.” And…
The highly anticipated Disney Plus streaming service, which will likely prove as essential as Netflix to many consumers, is now available. Disney Plus combines content from Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic into a single streaming app. You can dig into Disney Plus’ vault of animated classics, superhero blockbusters, TV shows, and new originals,…
I. Say your company makes a new email platform. In 2020, that means building not just a website but also an app — several of them, actually. You’ll probably want clients for Mac and Windows, iOS and Android, the open web, and — if you’re showing off — Linux. In some of these places, like…
I started this morning all riled up and ready to write a newsletter about how Google is using its market power in one segment — Gmail — to give itself a potentially unfair advantage in another segment: video conferencing. That was the plan, but then Apple decided to use its market power in one segment…
Mario is making the jump from the digital worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom to a new — but fitting — collaboration with Lego that lets players build their own IRL Super Mario levels. I’ve had the chance to try out the first sets, which are a fun spin on both the classic Mario and Lego…
Ahead of the long-awaited arrival of the next generation of video game consoles, Microsoft had clearly grabbed the initiative. Its reveal of the Xbox Series X at the Game Awards came out of nowhere, and Sony’s weak response at CES a few weeks later was to show off the PS5 logo. (It’s a PS4 logo…
When the pandemic stopped Sam Seifert from going into the office, he, like millions of other Americans, was forced to bring his work home with him. His work, though, wasn’t exactly suited to the domestic environment. It was big and loud. It stomped about his apartment and upset the neighbors. But that’s robots for you…
The official beta for the next version of Android is out now, and if you have a spare Pixel phone, I really do recommend you check it out. If you don’t, my recommendation is not to install it — betas are never a great idea on something you truly depend on, and your main phone…
The Last of Us Part II isn’t fun. Over the game’s 20-hour runtime, I often found myself wanting to quit because the violence became unbearable. I didn’t want to bash that lunging dog with a hammer or slice at that defenseless woman with a knife. I certainly didn’t want to watch a religious zealot’s head…
Tinder and its parent company Match Group have weathered the COVID-19 pandemic relatively well, all things considered. User engagement is up, as is interest around new product features, like video calls. More than six years after its launch, Tinder is finally introducing a one-on-one video calling feature that it says will be heavily moderated for…
There is one — and only one — reason to buy the Asus ZenBook Duo. If you’ve seen a picture, you know what that reason is: there are two screens. Specifically, there’s the primary display, a 14-inch 1080p matte screen. There’s also another display, a 12.6-inch IPS panel called the ScreenPad 2.0, built into the…
We knew ARM-based Mac processors were coming, but Mark Gurman is reporting at Bloomberg that Apple will announce the transition at its online-only WWDC later this month. Back in April, I called on Apple to announce as early as possible and to provide as much detail as possible to both developers and users. The main…
Today felt like an unusual lull in the intersection of our many unfolding national and global crises, and so I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about something different — a subject that, despite all my best efforts, I keep getting crushingly wrong. That subject is TikTok, the ByteDance-owned app whose fading into irrelevance…
Destiny 2’s first ever Fortnite-style live event just wrapped earlier today, and it was unfortunately not quite what some players were expecting. Instead of something monumental and game-changing for a key part of the game world, it was more of a slow burn alternative to a standard video game cutscene. And instead of delivering a…
On May 25th, the police killed George Floyd, and in every state, protests against police brutality and anti-black racism have been ongoing ever since. For reasons that risk trivializing a serious moment in history, the brands have also decided to speak up, too, issuing statements of solidarity across social media platforms. This, for better or…
When you’re stuck at home because of pandemics, bad weather, or just because you don’t feel like going out, there’s nothing more satisfying than cooking something really fantastic. Even if you’re not an experienced or enthusiastic cook, sometimes it’s really satisfying to create a new and tasty dish for you, your friends, and / or…
Sometime in the next few weeks, Fortnite will begin a new season, the third since its Chapter 2 overhaul debuted last October. I’ve been playing since the second season — which began way back in December 2017 — and over the years I’ve seen the game and its players change and evolve. The game shifted,…
Women like Jocelyn Kopac joined the Boss-Moms Facebook group to network and chat about life as both a mom and business owner, and considering the group has more than 50,000 members from around the world, life inside has been relatively mundane. Up until now, that is, while the Black Lives Matter movement is picking up…
The new Sonos Arc soundbar is perhaps the biggest flex of the company’s design, engineering, and technology advancements that we’ve seen yet. Whereas the $399 Beam was aimed squarely at the massive market of people looking to upgrade the dull, lackluster sound coming from their TV speakers, the $799 Arc represents the pinnacle of what…
HBO Max is AT&T’s big bet on the future of streaming, and it’s up to Tony Goncalves to pull it off. Goncalves is the CEO of AT&T’s Otter Media division, the group that’s responsible for the HBO Max streaming service. He’s been in and around AT&T for decades, led the launch of DirecTV Now, and…
On May 19th, New York University student John DiLillo attended Grad Alley, the school’s annual block party to celebrate commencement. For two hours, he and a few friends went to places like “Pictionary Island” and peered into the (surprisingly hollow) rubbery inside of a dolphin. He got stuck underground. He ran into exactly six people,…
If you’re anything like us, over the past couple of months you’ve probably finished every “must watch” TV series on Netflix, cleaned your apartment from top to bottom, and completed every video game in your backlog. We get it: social distancing can get pretty boring. So if you’re finding yourself with a lot of time…
In today’s digital age, it sometimes feels like hardware has taken a back seat to the software that drives our devices. Button of the Month will look at what some of those buttons and switches are like on devices old and new to appreciate how we interact with them on a physical, tactile level. Apple’s…
I’ve been waiting for the Surface Book 3 for two and a half years. Microsoft’s 15-inch Surface Book 2 was largely just a refinement over the original model — released nearly five years ago — so I was really hoping the company was holding back some big changes for the Surface Book 3. Unfortunately, no…
At launch, new streaming services prompt the same question: what can I watch? But HBO Max also elicits a different line of questioning: how is this different from HBO Now? From HBO Go? From AT&T TV Now? Do I have to pay extra for this, or is it wrapped into my HBO package? HBO Max,…
Joe Rogan is largely moving on from YouTube, a site that helped transform his podcast into a viral video-making factory, earning him nearly 10 million subscribers in the process. It’s the latest sign that creators who found success on YouTube see other platforms as the next step, but it doesn’t mean that YouTube is anywhere…
One year ago today, Facebook released the Oculus Quest, its first headset to deliver a credible standalone VR experience — true head tracking, good motion controllers, and so on. It also marked a split in the Oculus ecosystem: the Quest had its own store, curated with games that had been tailored specifically for the headset’s…
When Nate Fox was working on Sly Cooper, a series of stealth games about a master thief who also happens to be a raccoon, he looked around for inspiration on how to make anthropomorphized animals feel more real. This led him to the comic Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai, which followed a wandering samurai who…
Last month, before Google and Apple announced their joint effort to enable COVID-19 exposure notifications, I wrote about the trouble with using Bluetooth-based solutions for contact tracing. Chief among the issues is getting a meaningful number of people to download any app in the first place, public health officials told me. And now that such…
The hyperlink reaches my inbox a few minutes before 10PM on Saturday night. I click the link and enter a password. And at precisely 10PM, a video pops up on the page, welcoming me to Eschaton: part performance art, part nightclub, and all conducted over video chat. During the next hour, I stumble across some…
Even though E3, Gamescom, and other summer gaming events have become online-only or outright canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems there’s still going to be a lot of gaming news this summer. Publishers and media have already scheduled many digital events, promising news and announcements, which could help fill the void left by…
Lil Nas X’s “Panini,” NASA’s social media presence, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty line, and John Krasinski’s Some Good News YouTube show are among the winners of this year’s Webby Awards. The annual awards show celebrates the wide variety of things that happen online, from websites and podcasts to design and data visualizations to video series and…
Like all big tech companies, Google and Alphabet are playing an outsized role in our lives as the coronavirus pandemic continues. Whether it’s helping people find reliable information in search, working with the government on testing, building an exposure-tracking system into Android and iOS in partnership with Apple, or battling misinformation on YouTube, Google’s capability…
Making video games is a difficult endeavor at the best of times, but spare a thought for the people behind Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories, which finally came out last month for the PC, PS4, and Switch in the West. I first played it at a game show in Osaka in 2009; it was running…
The Gigabyte Aero 15 is a laptop aimed at designers and creative professionals. But when I first saw the thing, I didn’t believe that. It looks nothing like any laptop that comes to mind when I think of “creators” (the slim and sleek MacBook Pros, XPS 15s, Surface Books, and Zenbooks of the world). The…
A tale of two hardware divisions. Google, as reported by The Information, suffers with operational chaos that is as bizarre as it is inept. Hardware boss Rick Osterloh reportedly held a meeting where he tells everybody “he did not agree with some of the decisions made about the phone” — are these decisions not things…
After launching Untitled Goose Game on my Nintendo Switch, the game loads into its opening credits, transitioning from logo to logo. First, it credits the studio that made it, House House, then the publisher, Panic. After that, the screen reads “with support from Film Victoria.” Although the moment is brief, the credit on-screen gestures toward…
Gary Whitta is seated behind a thick wooden desk, hair perfectly coiffed, wearing a suit and a smile that curls upward like a macaroni noodle. He’s halfway through introducing his next guest, Greg Miller, when a beachball-sized head bobs into view. Whitta starts to yell. “Greg! I — goddamn you. Get back up the stairs.…
Live in Silicon Valley long enough and someone will tell you that the party is over. As far as I can tell, this phenomenon dates back to at least 1874. As Peter Hartlaub recounted last year in the San Francisco Chronicle, upon the occasion of a writer for the Washington Post announcing that San Francisco…
For obvious reasons, the interest in working out at home has never been higher. Whether you’re doing yoga with Adriene, working your way through Ring Fit Adventure, or scouring Amazon for a spin bike that’s in stock, you’ve probably been looking for ways to keep active without leaving the house. Me? I’ve been using VR.…
Taylor Walker worked hard during her time at Salem State University. She was her class’s homecoming queen, she sang in the university’s Grammy award-winning choir, and she completed a double degree in communication and speech. Graduation was her chance to reflect on all those accomplishments. To celebrate, she planned to host a party with her…
After months of hardware reveals, spec reveals, and hype, Microsoft is finally doing a proper first look at gameplay footage for its upcoming next-gen console, the Xbox Series X, showing off gameplay from 13 games that will be headed to the console this fall. Before you get too excited, the trailers showed off come from…
The biggest story of today is the creeping sense that April was in many ways another lost month in the COVID-19 response, with the average number of new cases rising slightly throughout the month to around 29,500 per day. Large swathes of the country are preparing to re-open for business even as all signs point…
Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has overtaken the climate crisis as the most pressing existential threat for much of the world’s population. As we adapt to isolation, the warming planet has taken an understandable back seat in the news coverage, although scientists have noted the spread of the novel coronavirus instigating a…
Kaweco Classic Sport Fountain Pen Nothing makes writing feel better than using a fancy pen, and Kaweco’s fountain pen is the perfect way to add some old-school charm to your note-taking, lease signing, or doodling without breaking the bank. Price: ~$19 Amazon Hario V60 Gooseneck Kettle There are many cheaper vessels for hot water, but…
On Wednesday, the field director for Mel Gagarin’s congressional campaign sat shirtless — illuminated by candlelight — in his bathtub reading a scary story over Instagram Live. “Bedtime Bathtime Storytimes” have become regular events for Gagarin’s campaign even if they’re only for an audience of around a dozen people, including other members of the campaign.…
If you’ve been working from home for the past few weeks, you’ve probably had to join more than a few video conference calls. Or perhaps you’ve been using video chat apps to keep in touch with friends and family while social distancing. Either way, you’ve probably noticed that the webcam on your laptop is, well,…
Microsoft now has 10 million subscribers to its Xbox Game Pass service, the company confirmed during an investor call yesterday. It’s the first time Microsoft has publicly disclosed Xbox Game Pass numbers, and it’s a sign that the company’s ambitious bet on subscription gaming is starting to pay off. Microsoft has been trying to build…
Despite pandemic-related hardware shortages, Facebook’s virtual reality business exploded at the start of 2020. The company revealed yesterday that it made $297 million in non-advertising revenue during the first quarter of 2020. That was “driven largely by sales of Oculus products,” rather than other products like Portal. The number is a full 80 percent higher…
When great just isn’t good enough After years mainly spent in the midrange phone market, Motorola burst back into the spotlight with the foldable Razr: it was bold, it was exciting, it was expensive, and it ultimately flopped. As interesting as it was, it simply wasn’t a very good phone. The newly announced Motorola Edge…
Last week, German techwear firm Acronym released a new version of its iconic J1A-GT jacket, one based on Hideo Kojima’s PS4 game Death Stranding. Like most Acronym gear, the jacket was both rare and expensive: it sold out almost immediately, despite a price tag of just under $2,000. But in another seemingly unconnected corner of…
The Final Fantasy VII remake does more than retell a familiar story from a classic roleplaying game. If you’re planning to play it, you shouldn’t read any further. But if you’ve finished the final chapter, you’ll know that its ending diverges pretty sharply from the original story — not only changing the game’s canon but…
Intel NUC 9 Extreme Intel’s latest NUC computer takes on the small form factor gaming PC world For the past few years, some of the most exciting developments in the PC gaming world have been around small form factor PCs. These compact machines are a fraction of the size of traditional gaming PC towers, but…
We got both the announcement and the embargo lift for OnePlus’ new top-tier smartphones yesterday. Here’s my review of the OnePlus 8 Pro and here is Jon Porter’s review of the OnePlus 8 — both with video. These phones are interesting for slightly different — but related — reasons. OnePlus has always positioned itself as…