The Verge

Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and Surface Laptop Go 3 during its recent hardware event in New York City, introducing the two laptops alongside a flurry of AI-powered features for Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and Bing. The high-end Surface Laptop Studio 2 starts at $1,099, while the Surface Laptop Go 3 starts at $799; both are slated to launch on October 3rd at 12AM ET.

Although the forthcoming laptops look similar in design to their predecessors, the new Surface devices arrive with upgraded processors, better battery life, and other minor spec bumps. We’ve yet to fully test either laptop, but if you want to preorder them ahead of their official release, you can already do so via various retailers. Here’s what you should…

Continue reading…

“The new FineWoven iPhone cases are very bad,” according to my colleague Allison Johnson, so you probably shouldn’t buy one. Still, I’ve been curious to learn more about them, and iFixit’s new teardown just gave me even more information than I could have thought to ask for: it put one of the new cases under a microscope, tested how it stood up to things like hot sauce and coffee, and tore the thing apart — and, best of all, photographed every step of the way.

There are some incredible zoomed-in photos of the fabric, for example; that black thing in a post from iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens is a human hair included for scale! Another photo shows how the fibers are affected when cut by a knife — it’s not pretty.

Continue reading…

These days, brands are all about selling you something more sustainable. In just the past week, we’ve seen Apple launch its first carbon-neutral products and Amazon start to share pollution reports for individual devices.

GM sponsored a major hub for events during New York City’s Climate Week, coinciding with a United Nations climate summit. I walked past its electric vehicles displayed in a conference hall outside a panel about living in a changing climate.

Down the hall, I grabbed “locally sourced, plant-based nourishments” from a cafeteria featuring recipes by Hellmann’s (maker of the mayonnaise). Trying to decide between a chicken farro bowl and a Tuscan kale salad, I realized that the numbers on the menu didn’t represent calories…

Continue reading…

Amazon was keeping close guard over its new Echo Hub smart controller in the demo room at today’s big hardware event. But I managed to get a few seconds of hands-on with a working tabletop unit before it was whisked away. I also put it through its paces on the wall-mounted version, and while it responded to touches promptly in some cases, it’s no iPad — or even Fire tablet.

Maybe it’s asking too much to have a powerful tablet that controls your whole smart home, mounted on your wall, for under $180. The Echo Hub did promptly turn on a nearby lamp when I tapped “on.” It swiftly activated a Baby Crying Routine that started lullabies playing on an Echo Show 5. It accepted swipes and presses with good response times — faster than the…

Continue reading…

Ever since our reviews for the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro went up on Tuesday morning, you’ve had a ton of questions to ask about the phones — in comments, on The Vergecast, on Threads, an Instagram App, and in a live Q&A.

So we thought we’d put all that information together in a nice little smorgasbord of nerdy tidbits and philosophical pondering and pick out a few favorites in the process.

I deeply respect a settings menu question

Since the mute switch is going away, Apple put an indicator in the status bar so you can check if your ringer is silenced at a glance. But what if you find it annoying and want it to go away? Great news: you will have the power to banish it from sight.

We almost…

Continue reading…

Amazon has announced plans to start placing “limited advertisements” in TV shows and movies running on the company’s Prime Video streaming platform, to allow the e-commerce giant to “continue investing in compelling content.” According to Amazon’s press release, the ads will first be introduced on Prime Video content in the US, UK, Germany, and Canada on an unmentioned date in “early 2024,” with France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia to follow later that year.

Amazon says it doesn’t have plans to change the current price of its Prime memberships in 2024, and Prime members will be notified of the change several weeks before the ad injections begin, along with details to sign up for the ad-free option. US-based Prime members will be…

Continue reading…

Microsoft’s incoming Windows 11 update will introduce public support for passkeys — a passwordless login technology that instead uses your face, fingerprint, or device PIN to sign into accounts. Announced at Microsoft’s AI and Surface launch event on Thursday, the latest Windows 11 update (available from September 26th) will allow users to create, manage, and store passkeys, and use them to access supported websites and services using their device’s own authentication systems.

Microsoft began testing passkey management in the Windows Insider developer channel back in June, so this Windows 11 update is bringing the technology into general availability.

Windows 11 passkeys are created through Windows Hello. Passkeys can be accessed on both…

Continue reading…

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has given preliminary approval for Microsoft to proceed with its $69 billion Activision Blizzard deal. The CMA had originally blocked the acquisition over cloud gaming concerns, but Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft.

“The CMA considers that the restructured deal makes important changes that substantially address the concerns it set out in relation to the original transaction earlier this year,” the CMA said in a press release, and “opens the door to the deal being cleared.”

This is just a preliminary decision, ahead of final approval. The CMA says it has now opened a consultation to gain…

Continue reading…

No One Will Save You wastes no time getting started. After a brief setup, it gets right to the action: a home invasion that’s actually an alien invasion. What follows is an incredibly tense, surprisingly quiet mix of sci-fi and horror, just the thing for a fall evening at home.

The movie — which is streaming now on Hulu — comes via writer and director Brian Duffield, who previously wrote similar genre twists The Babysitter and Love and Monsters. It centers on Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), a young woman who lives alone in a big, isolated house and who — for reasons that aren’t clear until much later in the story — is either ignored or hated by basically everyone in town. But she keeps herself busy making dresses, constructing a model village,…

Continue reading…

Valve has been clear it wants to build a Steam Deck 2 — and equally clear that a faster handheld wouldn’t arrive soon. Now, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge and CNBC that it could be late 2025 or beyond before it raises that bar — because it wants to see a leap in performance without a significant hit to battery life.

“I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years,” he told me via email.

Here’s the whole quote:

It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games. As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is…

Continue reading…