Author: News Room

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the legal travails of Big Tech, follow Adi Robertson. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.The year was 1998, and reigning personal computer giant Microsoft was on trial for violating antitrust laws, including by targeting its smaller competitor Apple. Apple occupied only a fraction of the PC market, while Microsoft held north of 80 percent. But its cross-platform QuickTime multimedia player threatened Microsoft’s own offerings, and a court determined that Microsoft had…

The $50 Epilogue GB Operator has a brand-new trick up its sleeve. In addition to backing up Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance cartridges and saves to a PC, it can now plug into your phone with a brand-new Retrace app for Android and iOS. The idea: check if cartridges are legit, and how much they’re worth, before you buy or sell them.Is it reliable? I plugged around 50 cartridges into the app, and… it could use some work. While most of my English and Japanese library was detected without a hitch, it also called a few…

Bird feeders have come a long way since their inception in the early 1900s. These days, it’s not all that surprising to see feeders kitted out with cameras and solar roofs, two marquee features you’ll find on feeders from both BirdBuddy and Netvue. And while modern hoppers can command a pretty penny, Amazon’s Big Spring Sale has dropped the Netvue Birdfy Feeder to $135.99 ($124 off) and Birdbuddy Pro to $179.99 ($120 off), which are some of the best prices we’ve seen.At their core, both smart bird feeders are designed to help you keep an eye on your soon-to-be feathery…

Apple’s most legendary computer has two legacies: there’s the computer itself, and there’s the commercial. That commercial. Only a couple of days before Steve Jobs debuted the computer that would both help cement his legacy and contribute to his unceremonious exile from Apple, the company dropped a Super Bowl ad that is still one of the most iconic commercials of all time. It raised both the hype and the stakes for the Macintosh in a big way.The Macintosh wasn’t a great computer, at least at first. It didn’t have enough memory; there wasn’t enough software that supported it; it wasn’t…

Suno just released one of its biggest updates yet with v5.5 of its AI music model. Where previous updates focused mostly on improving fidelity and creating more natural vocals, v5.5 is about giving users more control. It includes three new features: Voices, My Taste, and Custom Models.In the release notes, Suno says that Voices is its most requested feature. It lets users train the vocal model on their own voice. They can upload clean accapellas, finished tracks with backing music, or just sing directly into the mic on their phone or laptop. The cleaner and higher quality the recording, the…

I’ve been struggling to tell whether the ads appearing in my TikTok feeds have been made with generative AI tools. As someone who spends a great deal of time scrutinizing images and videos for the usual “tells” that something was synthetically generated, some of the promotions I’ve seen have definitely sparked suspicion. For several weeks, I didn’t see any examples with the AI disclosure required by TikTok’s advertising policies, however, so I had no way of knowing for sure.What irks me is that someone knows for sure if the content is AI-generated. They’re just not telling the rest of us.…

Is social media not just bad, but illegally bad? Should tech companies pay for making it that way? According to two US juries — and no shortage of outside commentary — the answer to both questions is “yes.”Earlier this week, two juries — one in New Mexico, one in Los Angeles — held Meta liable for a total of hundreds of millions of dollars for harming minors. YouTube was also found liable in Los Angeles, and both companies are appealing their losses. In one sense, the decisions were surprising. Meta and Google operate platforms for transmitting speech and are typically…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 121, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, good luck in the Elite Eight, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about Will Wright and sync music and the smartphone theory of everything, picking up The Soul of a New Machine again after hearing that Tracy Kidder died, adding SNL UK to my weekly YouTube clip rotation, watching all my favorite things collide when Hilary Duff went on Hot Ones, moving all my music into…

There are always a few reasons people give for not buying a foldable phone. Some — price, battery life, camera quality — are mostly a matter of manufacturers balancing spec sheets to offset the added cost of the folding hardware. Others — durability, size — were practical design problems that have mostly been solved. But the crease always felt different, fundamental: something that foldables would be stuck with no matter what.It claims that the Find N6 is the first foldable with a “zero-feel” crease, one so subtle that you can hardly tell it’s there. And while there’s just a hint…

We don’t review many solar panels at The Verge, but the tech inside Bluetti’s incredibly portable Sora 500 panel makes it worth a deeper look. The new N-Type panels made by Bluetti and others give you more bang for the buck, pound, and square inch. That’s a big deal for vanlifers like me who depend upon these beefy portable solar panels to extend off-grid stays.In real-world testing, I saw Bluetti’s 500W panel deliver 509W to my van’s power station, allowing me to generate over 800W when combined with the three sad 140W monocrystalline solar panels I have installed on top…

Last week I issued a reminder that Trump Mobile’s T1 Phone does not exist, and may never exist, despite the fact that the company showed me a phone in an effort to convince me otherwise. Today instead I bring cause for optimism for the Trump phone believers: it appears to have been certified by the FCC.FCC listings for a smartphone with the trade name “T1” show that it was tested late last year, and granted certification by the FCC in January. That lines up with what two Trump Mobile executives told me last month when I saw the phone, when…

Thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products.Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the acceptance of orders from our authorized dealers and from customers at the Sony Store from March 27, 2026 onwards.Regarding the resumption of order acceptance, we will consider it while monitoring the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page. Read the full article here